The relative importance of social responsibility in determining organizational effectiveness: Managers from two service industries

This paper investigates the relative importance of social responsibility criteria in determining organizational effectiveness as seen by managers of two service industries. The Organizational Effectiveness Menu (Kraft and Jauch, 1988) was used as a questionnaire with a sample of 53 firms. The conclusion is that while managers view ethical conduct as among the most important determinants of organizational effectiveness, numerous other social responsibility criteria are assigned relatively low priority. A question remains as to what managers will actually do when faced with limited resources.Kenneth L. Kraft is currently an Associate Professor of Management at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. His recent papers explore the relationships between strategy, structure, social responsibility, and organizational effectiveness in a variety of settings.     

Managing innovation and creativity in organizations: an empirical study of service industries in Taiwan

This study proposes a non-recursive model based on Amabile’s (Res Organ Behav 10:123–167, 1988) componential theory of organizational creativity and innovation to explain how resources, management practices, organizational motivation, expertise, creativity skills, and intrinsic motivation affect innovation and creativity in organizations. Based on the results of a longitudinal survey, with 586 leader–follower dyadic data drawn from firms in the service industries in Taiwan, we found that resources, management practices, and organizational motivation have unique positive direct effects on innovation, while expertise, creativity skills, and intrinsic motivation have unique positive direct effects on creativity. Most important of all, the results of this empirical study provide evidence for the reciprocal relationship between organizational innovation and creativity in the service context. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Waiting for service: modelling the effectiveness of service interventions

Most service businesses tend to experience unwelcome delays in service delivery that often generate strong negative impacts from customers. In response, managers develop and implement service intervention strategies, such as providing length and reason of a delay, both of which have been reported to have positive impacts on customers. However, the results from studies investigating such interventions are mixed. Accordingly, it is hypothesised that these effects may be contingent upon certain situations. This research project has investigated the wait situation using an experimental design. A 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design was first created using a restaurant scenario for the stimulus material and an online web site was used to collect data from 130 respondents. Our findings indicate a significant moderating effect of level of service use and degree of goal attractiveness on the effectiveness of providing duration and cause information. More importantly, we found that under certain conditions a service intervention may be counterproductive to the intended strategy. This finding suggests that managers need to be wary of developing and executing expensive service recovery strategies without due regard to the customer segment being targeted.     

The effect of knowledge complexity on the performance of franchise systems in the service industries: an empirical study

The literature of knowledge transfer studies complexity as a knowledge characteristic which influences organisations’ performance since it hinders this process. However, complex knowledge is richer and more complete and its influence on performance may be positive. So, the purpose of this study is to analyse the influence of knowledge complexity on the performance of franchise systems in the service industries. With this aim, a linear regression analysis is conducted on a sample of franchisee of different franchise chains of the several service industries operating in Spain. The findings seem to indicate that complexity has a positive impact on the performance of franchise systems.     

Profitability in Portuguese service industries: a panel data approach

Based on various panel models, we study the profitability determinants of Portuguese service industries. The results obtained show that profitability is persistent over time, and that for larger companies with greater growth, a lower level of debt and lower level of fixed assets are more profitable. Considering the results obtained, we can conclude that diversification of activities and motivation as well as the tendency to innovate contribute positively to increased profitability in Portuguese service industries, whereas the need to pay off debt charges periodically harms profitability. The government would be well advised to create special credit channels that would permit the greater growth of Portuguese service industries, especially those most inclined to innovate.     

Productivity growth and cyclical behaviour in service industries: the Spanish case

A longstanding basis of empirical economics is that average labour productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms, and thus behaves procyclically. In the short run, in many countries output growth and productivity tend to move together and across a wide range of industries. In recent years, this observation has gained increased prominence as each proposed explanation for the observed procyclicality has important implications for modelling the business cycle and measuring the technical change. By filtering out the influence of business cycles, it is possible to isolate changes in the long run, or structural rate, of productivity growth and so assess the importance of any source for economic growth. Nevertheless, the focus of these empirical works has been the aggregate economy or manufacturing industries, and not the services sector. The novelty of this paper is the focus on the patterns within the services sector. The aim of this paper is to better understand short-run changes in productivity growth within the service sector industries, which are necessarily different from those existing within the manufacturing sector. Another goal of this research is to assess whether this observed procyclicality remains if the service sector is the scope of analysis, and whether this is homogeneous among the different activities within this miscellaneous sector or not. Empirical evidence for the Spanish economy since 1980 is presented.     

Entrepreneurial applications of the lean approach to service industries

Service industries have grown significantly in recent years, especially in the advanced economies. The applicability of the Toyota system for manufacturing excellence to other industries has been widely studied. This paper seeks to contribute to this growing body of research by exploring the applications of the Toyota approach, particularly the lean system in the service sector. The paper examines the information systems that have enabled benefit in the service industries, to include vendor-managed inventory systems and variants, and then compares the benefits from information systems in support of supply chains. We also review why enterprise systems provide more opportunities in aiding the implementation of the lean systems. We present a case study of a South Korean supply chain system to demonstrate the entrepreneurial application of such approaches.     

Extent and distribution of unregistered employment in the service industries in Europe

ABSTRACT

Although a voluminous literature exists on the prevalence of the informal economy, few studies evaluate unregistered employment and none its prevalence and distribution across the service industries. This paper fills that gap. Reporting a 2015 European Working Conditions Survey based on 43,850 face-to-face interviews, the finding is that 7% (1 in 14) of service industry employees have no written contract of employment across the 35 European countries surveyed, although this varies from 34% in Cyprus to 1% in Sweden. A logistic regression analysis at the European level reveals significant associations between the propensity to work with no contract and various individual-, household- and firm-related characteristics, with unregistered employment more prevalent among women, younger people, those with fewer years in education, migrants, those living in households unable to make ends meet, those working in smaller businesses, and the hospitality and household service sectors. The theoretical and policy implications are then discussed.     

Organisational capabilities and transaction costs in the analysis of activities and their externalisation: implications for the service industry

Transaction cost theory and the organisational capability view are complementary in the analysis of the firm and in examining the decision to integrate or externalise activities. This article discusses the essential contributions of both theories to understanding the core aspects of the internal organisation of the firm, and goes onto address the key questions of why activities are organised internally or why certain components or services are obtained from suppliers or distributors; and finally looks at the cases in which firms make decisions with regard to supply, distribution or retail sales.     

Determinants of industry performance: region vs. country effects in knowledge-intensive service industries

Recent variance decomposition studies have started trying to determine the relative importance of industry and firm on profitability, but little research has been done to investigate exactly how much the difference in regions and countries could explain the variation in industry performance. This study explores the sources of knowledge-intensive service industry performance by comparing the relative importance of region, country, and industry effects. Using a variance components model fitted to a new data set, we find that while the country effects dominate industry performance around the world and in all regions (North America, South America, West Europe, East Europe, and Asia), industry effects too play a role in developing the worldwide knowledge-intensive service industries. We also find that regional effects have little significant influence on industry performance.     

The role of social conventions in the diffusion of open source software: Implications for service industries

In information and service products such as open source software, increasing returns occur on the production or supply side, as well as network externalities on the demand side. For open source software, the social community element needs to be integrated with the framework of increasing returns. This paper attempts to show that social conventions, and social herding behaviour are fundamental to the growth of the open source software. Such social conventions legitimise value and provide identification in the global online community and have important implications for service industries in general.     

Receiving word-of-mouth from the service customer: An emotion-based effectiveness assessment

This study examines how receiving negative and positive word-of-mouth from satisfied and dissatisfied customers influences the potential customer. By explicitly including responses in terms of emotions—which hitherto have been neglected in research on word-of-mouth—it was found that emotional contagion and affect infusion were involved in the response process. The net effect was that receiving positive word-of-mouth as opposed to receiving negative word-of-mouth produced more positive evaluations of the service firm in the word-of-mouth conversation and higher levels of purchase intent vis-à-vis this firm. The results are thereby consonant with implicit assumptions in existing literature that word-of-mouth from the existing customer may have a significant impact on the potential customer, and this study indicates that emotional variables play an important role in the influence process.     

加快商业地产咨询服务业的发展

过去几年中,国内城市化进程的不断推进,为商业地产在中国的快速发展创造了难得的机遇。2001年至今,全国商业地产供应年增长率达34％,越来越多的资金和投资主体被吸引到商业地产领域中来。但是,由于我国商业地产发展历史较短,相应的商业地产咨询服务业的发展尚处于初级阶段,且缺乏专业引领;由于商业地产的盲目放量,商业用房的空置率在持续扩大（2007年的全国空置率上升到了33％,每年的商业地产空置率增长速度达到惊人的15％……）。     

Investigation of agency agreement formation: new opportunities for marketing relationship development in service industries

This paper examines agent–principal agreements that prevail in marketing structures. Structural equation modeling reveals a new positioning of the relative importance of antecedents in agreement formation for two agency contexts (recruitment consultants and real estate agents). The insignificance of negotiation in agreement formation deviates from services marketing relationship models in which negotiation pre-empts commitment. A close coupling of agent attributes and information disclosure similarly positions business and consumer exchanges, contrary to sales literature. As agreement formation is not directly determined by any single event, management should not focus on outcome-based metrics for process refinement.     

Improving the effectiveness of persuasive communications: Matching message with functional profile

The functional approach to improving communication strategy has received little attention. This research attempts to partially correct this oversight by experimentally verifying the major functional hypothesis: matching message with functional profile brings about attitude change. Working adults were integrated into an experiment which was a before-after with control. The major functional hypothesis was confirmed at the 0.10 level. An associated hypothesis regarding the relative ease of changing value- expressive attitudes compared to utilitarian attitudes was confirmed at the 0.10 level. The results show the importance of matching message with functional profile and highlight the potential inherent in the functional approach.     

Promotion of service industries by means of entry restriction: the case of operators in the slot machine industry

Deviant service behaviour (DSB) is examined among employees of a cinema chain in the Netherlands. Behaviours that were reported in interviews with 47 employees of one theatre were phrased as items and were used in a survey conducted in three other theatres of the same chain (n = 115). Virtually all employees reported some DSB, but overall the frequency of incidence was low. Younger employees and those who had a negative attitude towards management reported it more frequently. Gender; education; full-time study; tenure; contract hours; location; and attitudes towards the company or co-workers were not related to DSB.