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This chapter examines the application of exploratory sequential mixed methods design in the context of small accommodation enterprises (i.e., home-stay). This study, therefore, discusses the exploratory sequential mixed methods of data collection and analysis and provides practical illustrations based on a study of small tourism enterprise sustainability practices in Ghana. The findings demonstrate that mixed methods overcome the weaknesses of a mono-method and offer an in-depth understanding of tourism and hospitality phenomena. In addition to providing a practical guide to emerging tourism scholars, the current study highlights the ability of mixed methods to develop emerging practitioners' skills in both qualitative and quantitative data. In conclusion, the exploratory sequential mixed methods design offers pragmatic data collection techniques that are non-existent in mono-methods. Accordingly, it is recommended for exploring research questions when there is limited information and high flexibility is needed.

Employee turnover is a growing challenge for health-care providers delivering patient care today. US population demographics are shifting as the population ages, which leaves the field of health care poised to lose key leaders and employees to retirement at a time when patient care has grown more complex. This means health care will lose its core of key employees at a time when skilled leadership and specialized knowledge is most needed and directly impacts health care's ability to deliver quality care. Operational succession planning (OSP) may be one solution to manage this looming challenge in health care, as the process identifies and develops the next generation of leadership. Thus, this exploratory national study used a quantitative and cross-sectional design to examine the relationship between OSP and employee turnover. Demographic and 10-point Likert scale data were collected from n = 66 medical practices, using an online survey instrument. Data were analyzed using various descriptive and inferential statistical methods. Distribution (frequency and chi-square) analyses of the study sample, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), and regression analyses were performed across seven demographic characteristics of the medical practices: Specialty, Ownership Structure, Number of full-time equivalent (FTE) Physicians, Number of FTE Clinical Employees, Number of FTE Nonclinical Employees, Number of FTE Employees Left Position, and Region. Study results provided statistically significant evidence to support the relationship between OSP and employee turnover, highlighting that OSP was associated with lower employee turnover. The finding suggests that OSP can serve as an effective mechanism for increasing employee retention.

This study investigates service excellence and hospitality perceptions in a hospital setting for an exploratory study of the familiarity of hospital administration with the topic of hospitality and service excellence. It is unique from other hospitality and service research in that it considers hospitality and service excellence as separate concepts, and specifically considers hospitality, such as service excellence, as a philosophy that may be transcend its traditional industries of origin. Part of the premise of this study explores how hospitality in a healthcare setting extends past service excellence in offering a service to a patient to create a comfortable and welcoming environment to combat patient anxiety and stress. This exploratory research provides a necessary foundation for more extensive empirical testing of the premise.

Using a qualitative case study, this research measured top management's perceptions of service excellence and hospitality within one community-based hospital located in Orlando, Florida. Three conclusions were revealed: (1) a mixed commitment by top management to concepts of service excellence and hospitality, (2) the terms “service excellence” and “hospitality” were generally discussed as though they were equivalent, and (3) significant external and internal barriers to the delivery of service excellence and hospitality in the hospital setting were identified.

The study has implications for healthcare organizations seeking to implement practices of hospitality and service management to improve overall healthcare service delivery. Additionally, the study of hospitality outside of its traditional industry boundaries may result in the generation of new improvement options/opportunities for traditional managers of hospitality businesses and organizational researchers. The study can be used as a foundation for the formulation of additional studies in the area of service excellence and hospitality applied to other layers in an organization irrespective of industry setting.

In the literature on relationships, many important aspects such as relationship outcomes (e.g. relationship quality, customer satisfaction) (Holmlund & Kock, 1995; Crosby, Evans, & Cowles, 1990; Homburg & Rudolph, 1997), antecedents (e.g. power, trust, commitment) (Kaufmann & Dant, 1992; Doney & Cannon, 1997; Morgan & Hunt, 1994), or the structure of relationships (e.g. processes, organizational approaches) (Parvatiyar & Sheth, 2000; Homburg, Workman, & Jensen, 2000) have been discussed as well as analyzed empirically.

This research explores the expectation gap between tax clients’ motivations to hire tax preparers versus tax preparers’ perceptions of those client motivations. The study builds on limited previous research by examining preparers primarily from local firms rather than focusing solely on large international firms. The Gaps Model of Service Quality provides the theoretical lens for the paper. We employ the recently developed Taxpayer Motivation Scale (TMS) to measure four client motivations to hire a preparer: (1) saving money, (2) saving time, (3) legal compliance, and (4) protection from the IRS. We measure expectation gaps for those four motivations using matched tax preparer–tax client dyads.

We employ statistical sub-group analyses to investigate the effects of both clients’ and preparers’ demographic characteristics that influence tax-expectation gaps. Results suggest client gender plays a noteworthy role in predicting many of the gaps. In addition, complexity of tax returns, children in the home, and client perceptions of tax-preparer advocacy help explain gaps. Finally, female preparers appear to be relatively more sensitive to client needs. We conclude that tax preparers need to (1) better understand their clients’ motivations for hiring them and (2) reexamine marketing efforts to educate clients about preparer credentials and potential strategy options for tax preparation.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive review of empirical research on performance management (PM) in former communist Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, to evaluate the state of knowledge in this area and suggest possible directions for future research.

An examination of the literature was undertaken to review the empirical studies treating on PM in ex-communist countries from CEE. A total of 96 journal articles, PhD thesis, and conference papers were identified, categorized, and analyzed according to research questions, methodology, and theoretical framework. Contributions are classified by countries, according to progress in transition process (post-transition/transition countries) and membership in the Soviet Union (Soviet/non-Soviet countries). The review examines publications in four languages (English, French, Romanian, and Russian).

The literature review identified various stages of development of PM research and practice in the different groups of CEE countries.

In post-transition CEE countries, PM research follows the trends settled up in the developed countries (quantitative studies examining the extent of usage of different PM tools, influence of contingent factors, relationship PM-strategy, and impact on company’s performance). Also, the findings illustrate the modernization of PM practices: increasing importance of nonfinancial indicators and integrated performance management systems (PMS), although financial indicators are prevailing.

On the contrary, in transition countries PM research and practices are at an early stage, the reviewed literature highlights some specific issues related to transition context: the dynamic aspect of PM, change management, importance of informal systems, cultural aspects, and business traditions.

Because of the large number of CEE countries and the diversity of their national languages, many studies conducted in native languages have not been addressed in this literature review, which is essentially based on publications in English and French. Only for three CEE countries (Russia, Romania, and Moldova) publications in national language were considered.

This literature review may be useful for practitioners, providing insights on the extent of diffusion and usage of different PM tools and identifying difficulties and pitfalls to avoid in their implementation.

The chapter represents one of the first contributions to the knowledge about PM research and practice in former communist CEE countries. The adopted framework for reviewing and classifying the literature allows identifying the differences in PM research and practices between post-transition/transition and Soviet/non-Soviet countries.

This manuscript reports an exploratory investigation to integrate emotions into the study of post-crisis communication. Using the discussion of the role of affect in Attribution Theory, the research integrates emotion into Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), one approach to post-crisis communication. SCCT uses crisis responsibility, how much people believe the organization is responsible for the crisis, to determine the most effective post-crisis communication strategy for protecting the organization's reputation. The research examines the amount of sympathy, anger, and schadenfreude generated by a variety of crisis types. The focus is on the connection between these three emotions and perceptions of crisis responsibility. The results suggest how emotion can be integrated into post-crisis communication and supports the value of including emotion in future research.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.