Darline Vandaele

How to Govern Business Services Exchanges: Contractual and Relational Issues

With firms concentrating on core competencies, more emphasis has been placed on outsourcing and the dealing with external sourcing agents. This has lead to a stronger academic focus on buyer-seller exchanges and the corresponding mechanisms for governing these exchanges. This paper gives an overview of previous research investigating the exchange governance phenomenon based on transaction cost theory or cooperative interorganizational relationships. The results reveal that few research studies have investigated the overall picture of exchange governance, including both contractual and relational governance and taking into account antecedents as well as performance outcomes of the governance mechanisms involved. Moreover, despite the service-dominant logic shift, limited attention is given to specific service characteristics and their impact on exchange governance. In this paper, we attempt to meld economic and social related antecedents into a model with regard to exchange governance in business services settings. Contractual and relational governance issues and their impact on performance outcomes are also considered. The resulting model indicates that to efficiently govern business services exchanges, more emphasis should be placed on behavioral uncertainty, human and process asset specificity and contractual governance. We conclude the paper by discussing several directions for future research.

Hospital Process Orientation (HPO): The development of a measurement tool

This paper looks at how process orientation can be measured using data from one large European university hospital. After a restructuring in divisions and the implementation of the care programmes and clinical pathways, hospital management came to the conclusion that they had no tools to evaluate if these changes were resulting in a process orientation on the work-floor. In agreement with hospital management, an existing tool of Business Process Orientation measurement was adopted and adapted to the specific context of healthcare. This paper reports on how the measurement tool was changed and validated in order to come up with a useful instrument to measure the process orientation of the employees in the hospital. The Hospital Process Orientation (HPO) tool can be useful to measure the effects of changes that are assumed to lead to more process orientation or even patient focus. In this way the pay-off of these investments can be made more tangible. The HPO tool offers hospitals a way to evaluate how they are evolving towards more process orientation.

Purchased business services influence downstream supply chain members

Purpose – Supply chain management and business networks have gained increased attention in services settings. The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of external purchased services by a service provider on the satisfaction of downstream supply chain members, i.e. end‐users. The focus is on transaction‐specific satisfaction as it provides in‐depth information on specific satisfaction elements.Design/methodology/approach – To test the propositions, one business service provider purchasing a service from an external supplier is selected. Data are collected by sending a web survey to the business service providers customers. partial least squares (PLS) is used to analyze the data as transaction‐specific satisfaction is considered as a formative construct.Findings – PLS analyses indicate that the elements determining satisfaction with the external supplier and those determining satisfaction with the business service provider differ. Moreover, transaction‐specific satisfaction of end‐users wi...

BOUNDARY-SPANNING BEHAVIOUR AND PERFORMANCE: INFLUENCE IN A BUSINESS SERVICES SETTING.

The article discusses the impact of boundary-spanning behavior, a type of customer contact employee behavior, on performance productivity and quality. A research study is proposed in the article where the hypothesis suggests that the positive effects of organizational citizenship behavior can also apply to boundary-spanning behavior. The hypothesis is tested with a security services company where the security agents are tested while performing services at their customers homes. Results showed that specific types of boundary-spanning behavior perform higher than dimensions of citizenship behavior. Certain behaviors directed at customers will determine performance quality.