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Full-Text Articles in Business

Diagnostic Tools For The Elevator Business, Clemense Ehoff Jr. Dec 2010

Diagnostic Tools For The Elevator Business, Clemense Ehoff Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of Business

Although much has been written about elevator maintenance from the engineering perspective, little has been written about elevator maintenance from a business perspective. This paper explores some of the business diagnostic tools useful in evaluating elevator maintenance performance and setting elevator performance objectives. These tools may also be applied to other types of maintenance operations.


Strategic Segmentation In Frontline Services: Matching Customers, Employees, And Human Resource Systems, Rosemary Batt Jan 2010

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 Jan 2010

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 …


Single And Multiple Interruptions Increase Task Performance Time, But Don't Affect Stress, Pressure Or Flow, Maureen A. Conard, Robert F. Marsh Jan 2010

Single And Multiple Interruptions Increase Task Performance Time, But Don't Affect Stress, Pressure Or Flow, Maureen A. Conard, Robert F. Marsh

WCBT Working Papers

We compared task performance time and psychological reactions for uninterrupted, single interrupted, and multiple interrupted conditions. For 110 undergraduates, those who were uninterrupted while completing a jigsaw puzzle were 26% faster than the single interruption, and 30% faster than the multiple interruption conditions. Single and multiple interruption conditions were not significantly different. Participants in the multiple interruption condition felt more stress than those in the uninterrupted condition, although stress levels were low in both conditions. Perceptions of time pressure and flow were not different across conditions. Performance on the interrupting task (a word search puzzle) was not significantly different across …