An empirical study of transformational leadership,team performance and service quality in retail banks

The discipline of operations management (OM) has long been offering differing quantitative techniques for improving the efficiency of banking operations. However, there has been a trend in recent years that operations and services of the banking industry are becoming more diverse and unstructured, rendering many traditional OM quantitative techniques less effective in performance improvement. By integrating the literature on banking operations, service quality, leadership style and work teams, we argue that leadership style and team performance are crucial concerns determining the service quality performance of today's banking operations in a team setting. Using data collected from 192 employees from 32 operational teams (a leader and five members in each team) in 15 retail banks in Macau, China, we investigated whether the five dimensions of transformational leadership have an impact on team performance with respect to team cohesion, team leader job satisfaction and team competence; and whether the dimensions of team performance have an impact on such service quality dimensions as reliability and responsiveness. We found that one of the dimensions of transformational leadership and two of the dimensions of team performance have a significant impact on service quality. We discuss the implications of the findings for research and practise.     

Types of Identification and Intergroup Differentiation in the Russian Federation

The fall of the Soviet Union affected the established identity patterns and intergroup relations in the Russian Federation. A survey investigates the effect of Russians' and titulars' identifications with their ethnic group, their republic, and the Russian Federation on intergroup stereotypes. We hypothesized that identification at various inclusiveness levels is differently reflected in the positive/negative stereotypes about in-group and out-groups. While in-group stereotypes would be positively affected by all types of identification, out-group stereotypes would turn more negative by ethnic identification and more positive by republican and federal identification. Further, we expected that republican identification would improve titulars' in-group stereotypes and Russians' out-group stereotypes, while federal identification would enhance Russians' in-group stereotypes and titular's out-group stereotypes. Russians favored their in-group mostly in positive terms. Titular minorities favored their in-group mostly on negative stereotypes. A model of intergroup differentiation is proposed that takes into account social identification at different inclusiveness levels. This model makes clear the potential threat posed by republican identifications to the stability of intergroup relations in Russia.     

The geometric exponential Poisson distribution

Many if not most lifetime distributions are motivated only by mathematical interest. Here, a new three-parameter distribution motivated mainly by lifetime issues is introduced. Some properties of the new distribution including estimation procedures, univariate generalizations and bivariate generalizations are derived. Two real data applications are described to show superior performance versus some known lifetime models.     

A comparison of statistical methods for combining relative bioactivities from parallel line bioassays

This paper compares the ordinary unweighted average, weighted average, and maximum likelihood methods for estimating a common bioactivity from multiple parallel line bioassays. Some of these or similar methods are also used in meta‐analysis. Based on a simulation study, these methods are assessed by comparing coverage probabilities of the true relative bioactivity and the length of the confidence intervals computed for these methods. The ordinary unweighted average method outperforms all statistical methods by consistently giving the best coverage probability but with somewhat wider confidence intervals. The weighted average methods give good coverage and smaller confidence intervals when combining homogeneous bioactivities. For heterogeneous bioactivities, these methods work well when a liberal significance level for testing homogeneity of bioactivities is used. The maximum likelihood methods gave good coverage when homogeneous bioactivities were considered. Overall, the preferred methods are the ordinary unweighted average and two weighted average methods that were specifically developed for bioassays. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.