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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 …
More Than Just National Cultural Distance: Testing New Distance Scales On Fdi In Slovakia, Douglas Dow, Sonia Ferencikova
More Than Just National Cultural Distance: Testing New Distance Scales On Fdi In Slovakia, Douglas Dow, Sonia Ferencikova
Douglas Dow
Over the past decade, numerous calls have been made within the international business literature for a broader conceptualization and measurement of non-geographic forms distance amongst countries. One promising response to this call has been a set of psychic distance stimuli scales put forward by Dow, D., & Karunaratna, A. (2006). Developing a multidimensional instrument to measure psychic distance stimuli. Journal of International Business Studies, 37(5), 575–577. However, to date, these new scales have only been tested in one very limited setting – predicting bi-lateral trade flows. This paper extends the generalizability of the Dow and Karunaratna scales by testing their …