Neeru Malhotra

The relative influence of organisational commitment and job-satisfaction on service quality of customer-contact employees in banking call centres

An inter-disciplinary approach is adopted to provide a deeper understanding of the human resource-service quality relationship. The paper tests the relationships organisational commitment and job satisfaction have with service quality of customer-contact employees. Hypotheses are constructed by reviewing literature in the areas of human resource management and services marketing. A study comprising 342 employees was conducted in four telephone call centres of a major UK retail bank. Investigates how different forms of organisational commitment and job satisfaction influence the service quality delivered by contact employees. Findings indicate that job satisfaction and organisational commitment of employees have a significant impact on service quality delivered. The affective component of commitment was found to be more important than job satisfaction in determining service quality of customer-contact employees.

Does Role Clarity Explain Employee-Perceived Service Quality? A Study of Antecedents and Consequences in Call Centres

Purpose – Role clarity of frontline staff is critical to their perceptions of service quality in call centres. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of role clarity and its antecedents and consequences on employee-perceived service quality. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual model, based on the job characteristics model and cognitive theories, is proposed. Key antecedents of role clarity considered here are feedback, autonomy, participation, supervisory consideration, and team support; while key consequences are organizational commitment, job satisfaction and service quality. An internal marketing approach is adopted and all variables are measured from the frontline employees perspective. A structural equation model is developed and tested on a sample of 342 call centre representatives of a major commercial bank in the UK. Findings – The research reveals that role clarity plays a critical role in explaining employee perceptions of service quality. Further, the research findings indicate that feedback, participation and team support significantly influence role clarity, which in turn influences job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Research limitations/implications – The research suggests that boundary personnel in service firms should strive for more clarity in perceived role for delivering better service quality. The limitations are in sample availability from in-house transaction call centres of a single bank. Originality/value – The contributions of this study are untangling the confusing research evidence on the effect of role clarity on service quality, using service quality as a performance variable as opposed to productivity estimates, adopting an internal marketing approach to understanding the phenomenon, and introducing teamwork along with job-design and supervisory factors as antecedent to role clarity.

Antecedents and consequences of service quality in consumer evaluation of self-service internet technologies

Advances in technology coupled with increasing labour costs have caused service firms to explore self-service delivery options. Although some studies have focused on self-service and use of technology in service delivery, few have explored the role of service quality in consumer evaluation of technology-based self-service options. By integrating and extending the self-service quality framework the service evaluation model and the Technology Acceptance Model the authors address this emerging issue by empirically testing a comprehensive model that captures the antecedents and consequences of perceived service quality to predict continued customer interaction in the technology-based self-service context of Internet banking. Important service evaluation constructs like perceived risk, perceived value and perceived satisfaction are modelled in this framework. The results show that perceived control has the strongest influence on service quality evaluations. Perceived speed of delivery, reliability and enjoyment also have a significant impact on service quality perceptions. The study also found that even though perceived service quality, perceived risk and satisfaction are important predictors of continued interaction, perceived customer value plays a pivotal role in influencing continued interaction.

Insights into the Indian Call Centre Industry: Can Internal Marketing Help Tackle High Employee Turnover?

Purpose – Increasing turnover of frontline staff in call centres is detrimental to the delivery of quality service to customers. This paper aims to present the context for the rapid growth of the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector in India, and to address a critical issue faced by call centre organisations in this sector – the high employee turnover. Design/methodology/approach – Following a triangulation approach, two separate empirical investigations are conducted to examine various aspects of high labour turnover rates in the call centre sector in India. Study one examines the research issue via 51 in-depth interviews in as many units. Study two reports results from a questionnaire survey with 204 frontline agents across 11 call centres regarding employee turnover. Findings – This research reveals a range of reasons – from monotonous work, stressful work environment, adverse working conditions, lack of career development opportunities; to better job opportunities elsewhere, which emerge as the key causes of increasing attrition rates in the Indian call centre industry. Research limitations/implications – The research suggests that there are several issues that need to be handled carefully by management of call centres in India to overcome the problem of increasing employee turnover, and that this also demands support from the Indian government. Originality/value – The contributions of this study untangle the issues underlying a key problem in the call centre industry, i.e. employee turnover in the Indian call centre industry context. Adopting an internal marketing approach, it provides useful information for both academics and practitioners and suggests internal marketing interventions, and avenues for future research to combat the problem of employee turnover.

Analysing the Commitment - Service Quality Relationship: A Comparative Study of Retail Banking Call Centres and Branches

Adopting an internal marketing approach, this paper attempts to provide a deeper understanding of the organisational commitment – service quality relationship in the service context. This is done by empirically testing the relationships that the three components of organisational commitment (affective, continuance and normative) have with the service quality of customer-contact employees. The hypotheses were framed by critically reviewing the extant literature in the areas of services marketing and human resource management. A large sample comparative study was conducted on employees in call centres and branches of a major retail bank in UK. We explore the important question of how the three components of organisational commitment influence the employee-perceived service quality differently in call centres and in branches. The findings indicate that in branches, both affective commitment and continuance commitment have significant positive impact on service quality while in call centres, only affective commitment is found to affect service quality significantly. Having established the commitment – service quality relationship, the implications for designing internal marketing strategies are further discussed.

Power Perceptions and Modes of Complaining in Higher Education

This study examines the relationship between student perceptions of different types of educator power and different modes of student complaining behaviour in the case of university education. A large sample of marketing students in the business school responded to the study from a state university in Northeastern United States. Factor analysis and canonical correlation analysis are used to explore the relationships between five bases of power perceptions (referent, expert, reward, legitimate, and punishment) and four modes of complaining behaviour (voice, negative word of mouth, third party, and exit). The results indicate that students engage in different modes of complaining as they perceive different types of educator power. The predominant complaining mode is found to be voice under referent or expert power, third party under legitimate power, and exit under reward or punishment power. Our findings offer important implications for student satisfaction, retention, and completion rates in higher education.

Revisiting the role stress‐commitment relationship: Can managerial interventions help?

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating influences of empowerment and professional development on role stress-commitment relationships, while examining and confirming the effects of role stress on organisational commitment. Design/methodology/approach: The results are drawn from a cross-sectional survey of 184 front-line employees (FLEs) from a travel service organization. Multiple and moderated regression analyses were employed to test the hypothesised direct and interaction effects. Findings: The results show that role stressors influence affective organizational commitment in FLEs negatively. Role ambiguity did not, unexpectedly, influence continuance commitment positively, but role conflict did. Professional development and empowerment are important management tools that can be used to combat the detrimental effect of role stress on organizational commitment. The paper finds empowerment to be particularly useful in combating the dysfunctional effects of role ambiguity on affective commitment, while professional development is a key tool that helps to combat the dysfunctional effects of role conflict on affective and continuance commitment. However, there are caveats associated with the implementation of these management tools. Practical implications: It is important for management to understand role stress from the FLE perspective, and strategically use intervention tools to help moderate the effects of role stress on organizational commitment components. Originality/value: This study adds further support to the literature that role ambiguity and role conflict should be studied as distinct components of role stress because treating role stress as a single construct may result in suboptimal outcomes for managers, and misleading findings for researchers. In this context, the paper contributes to literature by investigating the moderating impact of empowerment and professional development on the role stress-affective commitment/continuance commitment relationships. The findings suggest that different managerial strategies are required to combat the effect of each of these role stressors on the affective and continuance components of commitment respectively.

Understanding the mechanisms of the relationship between shared values and service delivery performance of frontline employees

Abstract Service firms strive to encourage their frontline employees (FLEs) to develop attitudes that support excellent service delivery. Anchored in the conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study aims to understand the mechanisms through which shared values influence FLEs’ service delivery performance. The study contributes to the HRM literature by developing and testing a conceptual framework among FLEs in the British hospitality industry. Findings reveal that shared values as a key workplace resource enhance the service delivery performance of FLEs through the following key intervening mechanisms: perceived organizational support, emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and affective organizational commitment. Findings further demonstrate a direct relationship between shared values and emotional exhaustion and an indirect relationship between emotional exhaustion and service delivery performance via affective organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are presented.

Reconfigurable tapered coaxial slot antenna for hepatic microwave ablation.

ABSTRACT Microwave ablation is rapidly being rediscovered and developed for treating many cancers of liver, lung, kidney and bone, as well as arrhythmias and other medical conditions. The microwaves ablate tissue by heating it to cytotoxic temperatures. The microwave antenna design suffers the challenges of effective coupling and penetration into body tissues, uncontrolled power deposition due to applicator construction limitations affecting uniform heating of target region, and narrowband operation leading to mismatch for many patients and detrimental heating. To meet out the requirements of wideband operation and localized lesion reconfigurable linearly tapered slot interstitial wideband antenna has been proposed for working in the 1.38 GHz to 4.31 GHz frequency band. The performance of the antenna is evaluated by using FEM-based HFSS software. The slot height and taper height are reconfigured for parametric analysis achieving maximum impedance matching and spherical ablation zone without requiring any additional adjustable structures. The tapering of the slot in coaxial antenna generates current distribution at the edges of the slot for maximizing specific absorption rate.

Managing boundary spanning elements: an introduction

The primary purpose of boundary spanning has been the information exchange between the organization and its task-environment. With complex, global organizational structures and increased emphasis on outsourcing, organizations today are susceptible to degenerate into ‘silos’ and in turn hampering the synergy and efficiency. Boundary spanning research becomes critical to answer some emerging questions in this area. Organization theorists have considered the boundary spanning construct an important one that explains the boundaries of an organization, inter organizational exchanges, dependence and in general, the concept of an organization. The research in this area seems to fall in two broad streams viz., Organization focused, dealing with issues pertaining to organization system, network, learning and collaboration and Individual focused, exploring issues of actors—and their attitudes, behavior—that traverse the boundaries of organization such as sales person, service workers and public servants. This chapter introduces nine interesting research studies presented in the following chapters of the book and attempt to put them in perspective in light of extant literature in the area of boundary spanning theory.