Self‐Service Operations at Retail Stores: The Role of Inter‐Customer Interactions

Inter‐customer interactions are important to the operation of self‐services in retail settings. More specifically, when self‐service terminals are used as part of customers’ checkout processes in retail operations without the explicit involvement of retailers as the direct service providers, inter‐customer interactions become a significant managerial issue. In this article, we examine the impact of inter‐customer interactions at retail self‐service terminals on customers’ service quality perceptions and repeat purchase intentions at retail stores. We conduct a scenario‐based experimental design (N = 674) using a 2 × 2 factorial design in which inter‐customer interactions are divided into “positive” vs. “negative” and occur during the “waiting” or during the actual “transaction” stages of self‐services at a retail store. We use attribution theory to develop the hypotheses. The results demonstrate that, through their interactions, fellow customers can exert influences on a focal customer's quality perceptions and repeat purchasing intentions toward a retail store. Furthermore, these influences were impacted by how customers attribute blame or assign responsibility toward the retail store. Service operations managers should leverage these interactions by designing into self‐service settings the capacities and interfaces that are best suited for customers’ co‐production of their self‐service experiences.     

Lay and Expert Interpretations of Cancer Cluster Evidence

Conflict frequently occurs between community members and environmental/public health officials when an unusual number of cancer cases is reported. This conflict may result from different ways in which laypeople and experts interpret facts to judge whether there is an environmental cause of the cancer cases, but little is known about this issue. Volunteer laypeople (N= 551) and epidemiologists (N= 105) read a hypothetical scenario about cases of cancer on one neighborhood block. Participants judged whether each of the 23 facts about the situation made it “much more likely” to “much less likely” that something in town was causing the cancer cases (7‐point scale). The facts were designed to be “alarming,”“reassuring,” or “neutral” (i.e., according to epidemiological principles, should increase, decrease, or have no impact on the likelihood of an environmental cause). The laypeople were alarmed by most of the facts (mean response significantly greater than the scale midpoint), including all of the neutral facts and over half of the reassuring facts. The experts were more balanced: they were alarmed by none of the neutral or reassuring facts. Their responses showed significantly less alarm than the laypeople's responses (p < 0.0001 for all comparisons). This study reveals that laypeople are not reassured by information that substantially lowers the chance of an environmental cause for cancer cases. Lay responses differ significantly and systematically from experts who are far less alarmed by relevant facts. These findings may help explain the conflicts between the two groups in situations where concern about cases of cancer arises in a community.     

Interactive Hazards Education Program for Youth in a Low SES Community: A Quasi‐Experimental Pilot Study

A pilot study of an interactive hazards education program was carried out in Canberra (Australia), with direct input from youth participants. Effects were evaluated in relation to youths’ interest in disasters, motivation to prepare, risk awareness, knowledge indicators, perceived preparedness levels, planning and practice for emergencies, and fear and anxiety indicators. Parents also provided ratings, including of actual home‐based preparedness activities. Using a single group pretest‐posttest with benchmarking design, a sample of 20 youths and their parents from a low SES community participated. Findings indicated beneficial changes on a number of indicators. Preparedness indicators increased significantly from pre‐ to posttest on both youth (p < 0.01) and parent ratings (p < 0.01). Parent ratings reflected an increase of just under six home‐based preparedness activities. Youth knowledge about disaster mitigation also was seen to increase significantly (p < 0.001), increasing 39% from pretest levels. While personalized risk perceptions significantly increased (p < 0.01), anxiety and worry levels were seen either not to change (generalized anxiety, p > 0.05) or to reduce between pre‐ and posttest (hazards‐specific fears, worry, and distress, ps ranged from p < 0.05 to < 0.001). In terms of predictors of preparedness, a number of variables were found to predict posttest preparedness levels, including information searching done by participants between education sessions. These pilot findings are the first to reflect quasi‐experimental outcomes for a youth hazards education program carried out in a setting other than a school that focused on a sample of youth from a low SES community.     

Will More Purchasing Options Benefit Customers?

This paper considers the sale of a seasonal product in the face of strategic customers. At the beginning of the selling season, the retailer announces both the price p_h at which the product will be sold during the selling season and the post‐season clearance price p<p_h for unsold items. We analyze two operating regimes: The “no reservation regime” allows a buyer either to purchase the product at price p_h when he arrives or to enter a lottery to purchase at price p if the product remains unsold. The “reservation regime” offers each buyer one extra option than the no reservation regime: reserve the product for purchase at the clearance price p. If the buyer reserves the product under the reservation regime and if it remains unsold at the end of the selling season, then he is obligated to purchase it at price p. We consider a situation in which heterogeneous customers with probabilistic valuation arrive in accord with a Poisson process. We characterize the rational purchasing behavior wherein each arriving customer is strategic; each customer takes other customers' purchasing behavior into consideration. By considering the Nash equilibrium of this game, we show that strategic customer behavior can render the customer to be worse off and the retailer to be better off under the reservation regime, despite the fact that this regime offers one extra option (reservation) to a customer. Hence, more purchasing options do not necessarily benefit customers.     

A Service Quality Process Map for Credit Card Processing

Evaluating marketing (external) and operations (internal) service quality performance in most organizations is a data-oriented management task that involves many variables for many different types of services. These two diverse sets of service quality information seldom “match up well” because the marketing and operations functions define and evaluate service quality “their way.” Management's interpretation of what the data “mean” often contributes to extra meetings, unnecessary disagreements within and between functional areas, and poor decision making. This situation can affect the quality and timing of decisions, and ultimately, the organization's profitability and market share. This paper quantitatively relates the customer's evaluation (perception) of service quality directly to the activities and performance criteria of the service delivery process for a credit card processing center. Basic statistical analyses and a recursive path analysis model define the relationships between marketing- and operations-based service quality information. The idea of a “service quality process map” is introduced. A service quality process map relates a flowchart of the service delivery process to the customer's perception of service using the power of multivariate data analysis. Management insights gained from an analysis of marketing (external) and operations (internal) measures of service quality performance can be used to allocate resources wisely. The objective is to gain the most improvement in the customer's perception of service for the least cost. Service quality with this type of evaluation capability can be used to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace.     

INTERVENTIONS INTO GROUP PROCESS: AN APPROACH TO IMPROVING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GROUPS*

Some new directions for research on group effectiveness are proposed. These include: (a) explicit recognition of group interaction process as the moderator of input-output relationships in groups; (b) research which focuses on the functions of group interaction in influencing group performance; and (c) use of experimental interventions which create new, non-typical patterns of interpersonal behavior in groups as an approach to studying group effectiveness. The results of two studies based on these proposals are summarized. One study examines the effectiveness of implicit vs. explicit discussion of group task “strategies”; the other addresses the effects of implicit (“traditional”) vs. explicit (“adaptive”) approaches to the maintenance of internal social relationships in work groups. Implications of the research are drawn both for future research on group effectiveness, and for the design of interventions aimed at improving the performance of on-going groups in organizations.     

Distributed manufacturing support systems: the integration of distributed group support systems with manufacturing support systems

Current Manufacturing Support Systems (MSS), such as Computer-aided Manufacturing (CAM) Systems, Computer-aided Design (CAD) Systems, Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) Systems, Material Resource Planning (MRP) Systems, and Manufacturing Accounting Control (MAC) Systems, are mostly independent systems that are operated in limited decision spaces, provide mainly formal and quantitative information, and thus pursue a goal of local optimization. To assist modern manufacturing in meeting the needs for integration, communication, collaboration, and decision making, we introduce the concept of integrating MSS with Distributed Group Support System (DGSS) into a Distributed Manufacturing Support System (DMSS). A rigorous system design approach is taken to model the manufacturing information requirements from a global perspective and pattern decision making processes within the structural (organizational design) and infrastructural (information system design) elements of manufacturing. The result is a conceptual DMSS design that provides an intelligent interface, accommodates incremental manufacturing integration, offers controllable message exchange facilities, and allows configurable communication networks.     

Quality in K-12 education: Parameters for world class achievement

It is widely believed by the American public that quality education is an unattainable goal in American elementary and secondary schools. A recent survey of twelfth grade students in the thirteen leading developed countries showed that American students ranked thirteenth. Another recent survey concluded that 25 million of our citizens are functionally illiterate and that an additional 25 million have to update their skills and/or knowledge to remain competitive in today's marketplace. The federal government and some state governments have finally recognized the relatively poor condition of our present educational system and have set initiatives to corect the educational crisis that exists. The authors describe former President Bush's “America 2000: An Educational Strategy” and President Clinton's “GOALS 2000: Educate America”, both of which have desirable goals but lack an approach for reaching the target and fail to specify any type of accountability for non-achievement. The authors then compare the American education system to an industrial or service organization and attempt to define the “customer”. Once the “customer” is identified, Deming's principles for management are shown to apply to education as well as to manufacturing and other service organizations. In developing this paper, the authors focus on:

1. government, initiatives to improve the educational environment,
2. the views of leading experts on the applicability of total quality management concepts to education, and
3. the strides that have been made toward educational quality improvement by some schools.

A case study describing the benefits which have resulted from implementation of a total quality system at an inner-city suburban New York City K-12 school is then presented.     

Strategic Design Responsiveness: An Empirical Analysis of US Retail Store Networks

This study uses a service operations management (SOM) strategy lens to investigate chain store retailers' strategic design responsiveness (SDR)—a term that captures the degree to which retailers dynamically coordinate investments in human and structural capital with the complexity of their service and product offerings. Labor force and physical capital are respectively used as proxies for investments in human capital and structural capital, whereas gross margins are proxies for product/service offering complexity. Consequently, SDR broadly reflects three salient complementary choices of SOM design strategy. We test the effects of “brick and mortar” chain store retailers' SDR on current and future firm performance using publically available panel data collected from Compustat and the University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index databases for the period 1996–2011. We find that retailers that fail to keep pace with investments in both structural and human capital exhibit short‐term financial benefits, but have worse ongoing operational performance. These findings corroborate the importance of managers strategically maintaining the complementarity of design‐related choices for improving and maintaining business performance.     

The Relationship Between Sustained Success and Donations for an Athletic Department with a Premier Football Program

Anecdotal discussions regarding donor contributions to athletic departments have long placed considerable emphasis on the success of the departments’ athletic programs. Among the most visible sports is football. The purpose of this study was to explore one high profile athletic department’s level of financial gifts and donations related to the performance of the university’s prestigious football program. The following data were collected for each year over an 11 year period (1998 thru 2008): the football team’s winning percentage; total money raised from donors; number of donors making contributions; number of contributions; and average size of each contribution. The researchers found that the only linier relationship that existed with the team’s winning percentage was a negative relationship between winning and the average size of each contribution (p < .05; R ² = .682).     

Internalities and Their Applicability for Organizational Practices

The economic concept of externalities was introduced to the field of behavior analysis (BA) by Biglan (2009). Since then, practitioners of BA have been able to apply this economic concept to behavior analytic theory, and create strategies to improve organizational practices. A similar economic concept to the externality is the internality, a cost imposed on an individual that is not taken into account when the person consumes the good or service. This paper will introduce the concept of internalities and discuss how it can be integrated into existing behavior analytic literature. Practices that produce “organizational internalities” will be analyzed using meta and macrocontingencies, with a discussion on how positive internalities can be promoted by an organization’s leadership. It will conclude with a discussion on how strategies regarding Organizational Behavior Management and Behavioral Systems Analysis can use the concept of organizational internalities to mitigate the negative outcomes of internalities, while simultaneously promoting positive outcomes of internalities.     

Media exposure,threat processing,and mitigation behaviors in Gulf Coast residents facing the co-occurring threats of COVID-19 and hurricanes

The 2020 hurricane season threatened millions of Americans concurrently grappling with COVID-19. Processes guiding individual-level mitigation for these conceptually distinct threats, one novel and chronic (COVID-19), the other familiar and episodic (hurricanes), are unknown. Theories of health protective behaviors suggest that inputs from external stimuli (e.g., traditional and social media) lead to threat processing, including perceived efficacy (self- and response) and perceived threat (susceptibility and severity), guiding mitigation behavior. We surveyed a representative sample of Florida and Texas residents (N = 1846) between April 14, 2020 and April 27, 2020; many had previous hurricane exposure; all were previously assessed between September 8, 2017 and September 11, 2017. Using preregistered analyses, two generalized structural equation models tested direct and indirect effects of media exposure (traditional media, social media) on self-reported (1) COVID-19 mitigation (handwashing, mask-wearing, social distancing) and (2) hurricane mitigation (preparation behaviors), as mediated through perceived efficacy (self- and response) and perceived threat (susceptibility and severity). Self-efficacy and response efficacy were associated with social distancing (p = .002), handwashing, mask-wearing, and hurricane preparation (ps < 0.001). Perceived susceptibility was positively associated with social distancing (p = 0.017) and hurricane preparation (p < 0.001). Perceived severity was positively associated with social distancing (p < 0.001). Traditional media exhibited indirect effects on COVID-19 mitigation through increased response efficacy (ps < 0.05), and to a lesser extent self-efficacy (p < 0.05), and on hurricane preparation through increased self-efficacy and response efficacy and perceived susceptibility (ps < 0.05). Social media did not exhibit indirect effects on COVID-19 or hurricane mitigation. Communications targeting efficacy and susceptibility may encourage mitigation behavior; research should explore how social media campaigns can more effectively target threat processing, guiding protective actions.     

INSTRUCTING OPERATIONS DESIGN: AN EXPERIENTIAL APPROACH

Teaching an operations design course has major pedagogical challenges. (1) The design topics—output, process, facility, and work design—are necessarily taught sequentially, yet the decisions are integrative. (2) Instruction must be generic to service or product producers. (3) Discussing output design is difficult since students typically have had no exposure to the “product language” of engineering graphics. (4) No text is available which examines in sufficient depth all the operations design decisions. (5) Cases necessarily depict historical situations—process technologies and economic data—while operations managers must plan future directions for their productive systems. (6) While the commercial world contains fresh information and data, students are inexperienced in obtaining knowledge from the real world. (7) While the course presents an operations management perspective, students must recognize the information, data, and cooperation necessary from the other functional areas to successfully complete the operations design. To help overcome these seven pedagogical challenges, the students in the undergraduate and graduate operation design courses complete a comprehensive feasibility study for a new product or service and the entire productive system.     

An Assessment of the Relationship Between Customer Satisfaction and Service Friendliness

Service friendliness has often been assumed to increase customer satisfaction, but that relationship has seldom been experimentally analyzed due to the difficulty of obtaining high customer satisfaction response rates. Consequently, a customer satisfaction data collection system, designed to yield a high customer response rate, was employed in a branch of Shawmut Bank where the relation between process-bank teller service friendlienss, and outcome-customer satisfaction was examined. Additionally, the effect of feedback on service friendliness was examined. Subjects were three tellers whose rates of greeting and smiling and looking at their customers during the first three seconds of the service interaction were obtained by direct observation. Satisfaction data were gathered by asking customers to rate teller service immediately following the interaction by depositing chips into a survey box located in the bank lobby. A customer satisfaction response rate of 99% was obtained using the chips method. Additionally, all three behaviors increased substantially with feedback. Greeting was found to be positively correlated (p < .05) with customer satisfaction.     

Measuring exposure to bullying at work: The validity and advantages of the latent class cluster approach

Abstract

This paper addresses the construct and predictive validity of two methods for classifying respondents as victims of workplace bullying. Although bullying is conceived as a complex phenomenon, the dominant method used in bullying surveys, the operational classification method, only distinguishes two groups: victims versus non-victims. Hence, the complex nature of workplace bullying may not be accounted for. Therefore a latent class cluster approach is suggested to model the data, which was obtained by using the Negative Acts Questionnaire (NAQ) administered to employees in Belgium (n=6,175). Latent class modelling is a method of analysis that does not appear to have been used in occupational health psychology before. In this study, six latent classes emerged: “not bullied,” “limited work criticism,” “limited negative encounters,” “sometimes bullied,” “work related bullied,” and “victims.” The results show that compared to the traditional operational classification method, the latent class cluster approach shows higher construct and higher predictive validity with respect to self-assessments and indicators of strain and well-being at work. The consequences of these results for theory, future research, and practice are discussed.     

Behavioral Economics and Regulatory Analysis

Behavioral economics has captured the interest of scholars and the general public by demonstrating ways in which individuals make decisions that appear irrational. While increasing attention is being focused on the implications of this research for the design of risk‐reducing policies, less attention has been paid to how it affects the economic valuation of policy consequences. This article considers the latter issue, reviewing the behavioral economics literature and discussing its implications for the conduct of benefit‐cost analysis, particularly in the context of environmental, health, and safety regulations. We explore three concerns: using estimates of willingness to pay or willingness to accept compensation for valuation, considering the psychological aspects of risk when valuing mortality‐risk reductions, and discounting future consequences. In each case, we take the perspective that analysts should avoid making judgments about whether values are “rational” or “irrational.” Instead, they should make every effort to rely on well‐designed studies, using ranges, sensitivity analysis, or probabilistic modeling to reflect uncertainty. More generally, behavioral research has led some to argue for a more paternalistic approach to policy analysis. We argue instead for continued focus on describing the preferences of those affected, while working to ensure that these preferences are based on knowledge and careful reflection.     

Competition and Coordination in Two‐Tier Public Service Systems under Government Fiscal Policy

As a result of government budgetary limits and rapid market growth, many public service systems—such as health care—are characterized by extensive customer wait times that have become a serious problem. This problem might be solved by allowing private firms to enter these markets, which would provide customers with a choice between a free (governmental) public service provider (SP) and a fee‐charging (or “toll”) private SP. In such a two‐tier service system, the two SPs are differentiated by service quality and cost efficiency. This study focuses on the competition and coordination issues for two‐tier service systems with customers who are sensitive to both service quality and delay. The free system attempts to maximize its expected total customer utility with limited capacity, whereas the toll system attempts to maximize its profit. Neither goal is aligned with the social welfare goal of the public service. To achieve the social welfare goal, the government plays a crucial role in coordinating the two‐tier service system via the budget, the tradeoff of social members' goals, and tax‐subsidy policies. Using a mixed duopoly game, we establish Nash equilibrium strategies and identify the conditions for the existence of the two‐tier service system. We employ several interesting and counter‐intuitive managerial insights generated by the model to show that the public service can be delivered more efficiently via customer choice and SP competition. In addition, we show that a relatively low tax‐subsidy rate can almost perfectly coordinate the two SPs to achieve most of the maximum possible benefit of the two‐tier service system.     

Organizational interventions: A research-based framework for the evaluation of both process and effects

Abstract

Organizational interventions are often recommended when organizations want to improve employee psychological health and well-being. Research, however, has revealed inconsistent results and reviewers have called for research on why interventions either bring about desired change or fail to do so. Answering the “how” and “why” of intervention outcomes requires a close examination of the elements that hinder or facilitate desired outcomes, thus moving beyond evaluation of only the overall effects. In this paper, we present an evaluation framework based on recent intervention research and process-oriented organization theory. The framework offers suggestions for which elements to include when evaluating organizational interventions. Within the framework, elements crucial to intervention evaluation are grouped into four overarching categories that we argue are crucial to evaluation over the five phases of an intervention programme. These categories are: the organizational “actors”; the mental models of those actors; the context of the intervention; and intervention design and process. Evaluation during the process as well as of the overall effects, as recommended by this framework, should throw light on what works for whom, why, how and under which circumstances.