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Technology has transformed teaching and learning environments in tertiary education, introducing new collaborative library spaces and developing the roles and skills of library staff. Academic libraries need continually to re‐examine their services to ensure they meet student needs. The current survey aimed to discover how students perceived staff in the Information Commons (IC) and whether their perceptions of staff attitudes and skills influenced their use of library resources.

A questionnaire containing closed and open questions was distributed electronically to undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Sheffield, obtaining 250 responses (around 1 per cent of the student population).

The results showed that most students were unable to distinguish different groups of staff, were unaware of their departmental librarian and did not recognise the academic role of librarians. However, those who had sought assistance in the IC or attended classes delivered by librarians had positive views of their experiences.

The timing and fixed duration of the study limited the size and nature of the sample, the generalisability of the findings and depth of the investigation, but sufficient data were collected to establish patterns of behaviour and identify important factors.

Low awareness among students of the expertise of librarians and their capacity to provide academic support indicates a need for more promotion to ensure library resources are properly utilised.

The study is thought to be the first of its kind conducted in the UK and the only such survey carried out in an IC setting.

The purpose of this paper is to determine how the presence of cleaning staff affects perceptions and satisfaction of train passengers. Day-time cleaning is becoming increasingly popular in (public) service environments. It is however unknown how the presence of cleaning staff in the service environment affects perceptions and satisfaction of end-users.

Two experimental field studies were performed. Data for the first study were collected on the trajectory between the train station of Assen and the station of Groningen (N = 506) in the northern part of the Netherlands. Data for the second study were collected on the trajectory between train station “Amsterdam Amstel” and train station “Utrecht Centraal” (N = 1,113) in the central part of the Netherlands. In the experimental condition, two cleaners collected waste and performed minor cleaning activities (i.e. empty trash bins, cleaning doors and tables) during the journey. After the first study, cleaners received hospitality training and corporate uniforms.

The presence of cleaning staff positively influenced train passengers’ perceptions and satisfaction. Effects were stronger in the second study, after the second consecutive intervention (i.e. hospitality training, corporate uniforms). In both studies, the presence of cleaners positively influenced passengers’ perceptions of staff, cleanliness and comfort. The perception of atmosphere was only significant after the intervention.

The findings of this study allow in-house and corporate facility managers to better understand the possible effects of the presence of their cleaning staff on end-user perceptions and satisfaction.

The study’s value lies in its human centred approach by demonstrating the importance of day-time cleaning. This area of research has been largely neglected in the field of facilities and (public) services management research.

The need to better understand patient priorities in order to provide higher levels of patient care is an ongoing challenge for managers across the UK NHS. Indeed, the failure of service providers to understand patient priorities can lead to action plans, investment and management decisions which are internally rather than externally focused. This paper seeks to report on the development and evaluation of a tool for measuring the gap between patients’ priorities and their perceptions of an NHS service, and the match between the patient and management perspective.

The tool, an adaptation of the renowned SERVQUAL measurement methodology, is tested in UK NHS breast‐screening unit. The tool is used to measure the perceptions of two different types of patients, as well as those of three different types of staff.

The study suggests that the tool can be used to quantify the gap between patient priorities and their perceptions of health service performance. The tool may also be used to measure staff's perceptions of patient priorities and perceptions, with a view to identifying those functional staff who best understand the patient perspective.

The methodology facilitates the identification of key differences in the expectations and perceptions of different health service market segments, which could have direct implications for service design and delivery at an operational level. Furthermore, it can be applied to identify differences in functional perspectives and thus expose valuable opportunities for intra‐organisational learning.

This paper aims to report on the findings of a study into staff perceptions of service climate in New Zealand English language centres (ELCs) offering ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) courses.

A 71‐item questionnaire based on a Likert scale was used to survey non‐management teaching and administrative staff about their perceptions of the climate quality in their institutions.

The paper finds that staff in New Zealand ELCs demonstrated a positive perception of the service climate quality in their institutions. Service orientation was viewed as the most positive aspect of ELC service climate. Management aspects were not so positively perceived. The least positively‐perceived aspect of the service climate was resourcing. Significant differences in climate perceptions were identified among staff sub‐groups, and between staff in different ELC types.

The limitations of convenience samples are acknowledged. Further research is advocated into management and administrative aspects of ELCs operating in the private sector, as well as into the operation of other educational institutions in a commercial environment.

The paper shows that ELCs are doing well in terms of “soft” service management areas, e.g. service orientation and client focus, but need to pay more attention to the “hard” areas such as resourcing and basic management competencies.

ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) administration and management is a highly under‐researched area. This is one of the few pieces of empirical research in this sector, and thus represents a unique contribution to the literature. The findings will be of interest to anyone working and/or researching in the area of ELC/ESOL management, or in the area of private education provision.

This paper aims to model staff reactions to a hotel based on the way they perceive hotel’s treatment of customers. It suggests that employees are not motivated to help abused customers in the form of customer-oriented behaviors (COBs) until employees also feel that they are victims of abuse by the hotel. Hence, effects of staff’s unfavorable justice perceptions for customers on employee COBs are expected to be negative until staff’s unfavorable justice perceptions for themselves, interacting in this relationship, turn it positive.

Drawing on social exchange and compassion theories, the argument is made that staff members who are also victims of abuse by the hotel can empathize more with guests, turning quid pro quo responses to abuse of customers into compassionate responses.

Regression results from a field study of 280 employees at ten hotels in the Canary Islands provide general support for our hypotheses.

By understanding when and why (un)fair treatment of guests and staff has consequences for the hotel in the form of COBs, hotel managers can favor a better staff response to hotels’ careful stewardship of the service encounter in terms of COBs. The reversal of the direction in the relationship suggests the unfolding of compassion within a justice framework, which challenges the long-lived perceived incompatibility between compassion and justice in the organizational literature.

The present study is the first one to study COBs stemming either from staff responses to hotels’ abuse of customers or COBs resulting from the interaction between perceived justice for customers and justice perceptions for themselves.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of empathy in the student service experience. Taking a dyadic perspective, both students’ and staff’s perceptions are analyzed to determine if empathy matters to both actors alike; and which differences in perceptions about the role of empathy between these actors exist.

The authors adopt a multi-method approach and used data from 256 usable survey responses from 11 higher education service providers in Singapore. Empathy was operationalized by six cognitive and affective independent variables and multiple multivariate analyses are applied, such as multivariate analysis of variance, discriminant analysis and multiple regression analysis.

Results show that both students and staff alike evaluate empathy as important in the co-created service experience. The provision of individualized attention to students to positively influence student experience in learning was deemed important by both staff and students. Yet, there are also distinct differences. For students, it is essential that staff members have students’ best interests at heart; for staff members, knowledge of students’ needs and show of care and concern are important.

Students and staff perceive empathy in higher education service provision differently. Interestingly, whilst staff think caring for students is important, students feel that too much care and concern from staff has a negative effect on their experience. Hence, too much care and concern might cause potential issues with the students’ perception of “over-servicing” which might manifest as “spoon-feeding.” Instead, students are asking for individualized and professionalized attention to be taken seriously and to be involved in the co-creation of the education service experience.

This study advances the understanding of affective and cognitive aspects of empathy and their influence on students’ service experiences.

There is a growing academic interest in the examination and exploration of work intensification in a wide range of healthcare settings. The purpose of this paper is to explore the differing staff perceptions in emergency ambulance services in the UK. It provides evidence on the challenges for the paramedic professionalisation agenda and managing operational demands and work intensity in emotionally challenging circumstances, with significant implications for patient safety.

Drawing on the evidence from an empirical study in a large National Health Service ambulance trust in England, this paper examines the challenges and differing staff perceptions of the changing scope and practice of ambulance personnel in the UK. Amidst the progress on the professionalisation of the paramedic agenda, individual trusts are facing challenges in form of staff attitudes towards meeting performance targets, coupled with rising demand, fear of loss of contracts and private competition.

Research findings highlight differing perceptions from various sub-cultural groups and lack of clarity over the core values which are reinforced by cultural and management differences. Need for greater management to explore the relationship between high sickness levels and implications for patient safety including the need for policy and research attention follows from this study. The implications of work intensity on gender equality within the ambulance settings are also discussed.

Ambulance services around the world are witnessing a strain on their operational budgets with increasing demand for their services. Study evidence support inconclusive evidence for patent safety despite the growing specialist paramedic roles. Organisational implications of high staff sickness rates have been largely overlooked in the management literature. This study makes an original contribution while building upon the earlier conceptions of work intensification.

The study findings have significant implications for the ambulance services for better understanding of the staff perceptions on work intensity and implications for patient safety, high sickness absence rates amidst increasing ambulance demand. Study findings will help prepare the organisational policies and design appropriate response.

Societal understanding about the organisational implications of the work intensity in an important emergency response service will encourage further debate and discussion.

This study makes an original contribution by providing insights into the intra-organisational dynamics in an unusual organisational setting of the emergency ambulance services. Study findings have implications for further research inquiry into staff illness, patient safety and gender issues in ambulance services. Evidence cited in the paper has further relevance to ambulance services globally.

Coercive practices – which are used as means to manage violent/aggressive behaviour in secure forensic settings – have come under scrutiny in recent years due to their paradoxical effects on provoking further service user aggression and violence. Previous research has found relationships between increased service user aggression with both service users’ interpersonal styles and perceptions of staff coercion (i.e. staff limit setting). This paper aims to investigate whether forensic service users’ levels of interpersonal sensitivity to dominance increase levels of self-reported anger and rates of aggression towards staff through perceptions of staff coercion.

In a cross-sectional quantitative study design, 70 service users were recruited from one high and two medium secure forensic hospitals. Standardised measures were completed by service users and recorded incident data was collected within the past year. Correlation and mediation analyses were run to investigate the relationship between study variables.

A significant relationship was found between service users’ interpersonal sensitivity to dominance and self-reported rates of anger, where forensic service users’ who had higher levels of interpersonal sensitivity to others’ dominance were likely to report higher rates of anger. No significant relationships were found between all other study variables.

The findings from this study contradict previous research where coercive practices may not necessarily increase rates of aggression towards staff but, in the context of service users’ interpersonal sensitivities to dominance, it may be more useful to consider the way in which coercive practices are implemented.

There is a gap in the literature, which looks at the way in which forensic service users perceive coercive practices in relation to their interpersonal sensitivities and whether this too has an impact upon service user aggression.

Explores the extent to which the construct service quality plays in an internal marketing setting. A conceptual model known as the “Internal Service Quality Model” was designed based on the original “GAP Model” developed by Parasuraman. The model evaluated the dimensions, and their relationships, that determine service quality among internal customers (front‐line staff) and internal suppliers (support staff) within a large service organisation, namely, Singapore Airlines. The dependent variable in this study was internal service quality (ISQ), while the independent variables were tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. The results suggest that the perceptions and expectations of internal customers and internal suppliers play a major role in recognising the level of internal service quality perceived. The acceptance of the postulated hypotheses has confirmed the importance of the internal service quality construct, thus acknowledging the usefulness of the INTSERVQUAL instrument and the conceptualised Internal Service Quality Model proposed in this research study.

The authors explored clinical staff perceptions of their interactions with middle management and their experiences of the uncongeniality of their working environment.

Semi-structured interviews of clinical staff from an Australian public health service's Emergency, Surgery and Psychiatry departments. Volunteer interview transcripts were inductively coded using a reflexive thematic content analysis.

Of 73 interviews, 66 participants discussed their interactions with management. Most clinicians considered their interactions with middle management to be negative based on a violation of their expectations of support in the workplace. Collectively, these interactions formed the basis of clinical staff perceptions of management's lack of capacity and fit for the needs of staff to perform their roles.

Strategies to improve management's fit with clinicians' needs may be beneficial for reducing uncongenial workplaces for healthcare staff and enhanced patient care.

This article is among the few papers that discuss interactions with management from the perspective of clinical staff in healthcare. How these perspectives inform the perception of workplace uncongeniality for clinicians contributes greater understanding of the factors contributing to adversarial relationships between clinicians and managers.