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Full-Text Articles in Business
From Bureaucracy To Enterprise? The Changing Jobs And Careers Of Managers In Telecommunications Service, Rosemary Batt
From Bureaucracy To Enterprise? The Changing Jobs And Careers Of Managers In Telecommunications Service, Rosemary Batt
Rosemary Batt
[Excerpt] In response to technological change and product market deregulation, longstanding U.S. telecommunications firms are radically restructuring their business strategies and organizations to improve competitiveness. While the popular and business press as well as academic researchers have focused attention on the dramatic changes occurring in the collapse of industry boundaries, megamergers, and the rise of new strategic alliances, they have largely ignored how these structural changes are profoundly altering the employment and careers of employees. In the Bell operating companies, where bureaucracy is seen as the major obstacle to competitiveness, managerial workers have become a significant target of reform because …
Human Resource And Employment Practices In Telecommunications Services, 1980-1998, Rosemary Batt, Jeffrey Keefe
Human Resource And Employment Practices In Telecommunications Services, 1980-1998, Rosemary Batt, Jeffrey Keefe
Rosemary Batt
[Excerpt] In the academic literature on manufacturing, much research and debate have focused on whether firms are adopting some form of “high-performance” or “high-involvement” work organization based on such practices as employee participation, teams, and increased discretion, skills, and training for frontline workers (Ichniowski et al., 1996; Kochan and Osterman, 1994; MacDuffie, 1995). Whereas many firms in the telecommunications industry flirted with these ideas in the 1980s, they did not prove to be a lasting source of inspiration for the redesign of work and employment practices. Rather, work restructuring in telecommunications services has been driven by the ability of firms …
Strategic Segmentation In Frontline Services: Matching Customers, Employees, And Human Resource Systems, Rosemary Batt
Strategic Segmentation In Frontline Services: Matching Customers, Employees, And Human Resource Systems, Rosemary Batt
Rosemary Batt
This paper examines variation in the use of high involvement work practices in service and sales operations. I argue that the relationship between the customer and frontline service provider is a central feature that distinguishes production-level service activities from manufacturing. In particular, through strategic segmentation, firms are able to segment customers by their demand characteristics and to match the complexity and potential revenue stream of the customer to the skills of employees and the human resource system that shapes the customer-employee interface. Unlike manufacturing, where high involvement systems have emerged in a wide variety of product markets, therefore, service organizations …
Who Benefits From Teams? Comparing Workers, Supervisors, And Managers, Rosemary Batt
Who Benefits From Teams? Comparing Workers, Supervisors, And Managers, Rosemary Batt
Rosemary Batt
This paper offers a political explanation for the diffusion and sustainability of team-based work systems by examining the differential outcomes of team structures for 1200 workers, supervisors, and middle managers in a large unionized telecommunications company. Regression analyses show that participation in self-managed teams is associated with significantly higher levels of perceived discretion, employment security, and satisfaction for workers and the opposite for supervisors. Middle managers who initiate team innovations report higher employment security, but otherwise are not significantly different from their counterparts who are not involved in innovations. By contrast, there are no significant outcomes for employees associated with …
Human Resource Practices As Predictors Of Work-Family Outcomes And Employee Turnover, Rosemary Batt, P. Monique Valcour
Human Resource Practices As Predictors Of Work-Family Outcomes And Employee Turnover, Rosemary Batt, P. Monique Valcour
Rosemary Batt
Drawing on a non-random sample of 557 dual- earner white collar employees, this paper explores the relationship between human resource practices and three outcomes of interest to firms and employees: work-family conflict, employees’ control over managing work and family demands, and employees’ turnover intentions. We analyze three types of human resource practices: work-family policies, HR incentives designed to induce attachment to the firm, and the design of work. In a series of hierarchical regression equations, we find that work design characteristics explain the most variance in employees’ control over managing work and family demands, while HR incentives explain the most …