Nicole Hartley

Feathers in the nest: Establishing a supportive environment for women researchers.

This paper discusses research examining the attitudes and behaviours of researching women in academia and considers the effect of these factors on successful researching outcomes. The results of this exploratory research highlight in particular, a number of interesting environmental influencers which contribute to enhancing successful work outcomes for academic women researchers. Specifically, personal factors such as, marital status, partner support, age, cultural background and level of organisation (in life) coupled with, research defined factors such as incentive for conducting the research and the existence of research partnerships and/or groups are identified as significant performance influencers. These dimensions appear to facilitate the level of research productivity for women academics based on key performance indicators such as journal/conference paper submissions and successful research funding applications. The potential benefits of this exploratory research are that any correlation between specific self-supporting attitudes or behaviours of successful women academics and effective research outcomes could provide important clues to both emerging and continuing researchers for career development and promotion.

Service Provider’s Experiences of Service Separation: The Case of Telehealth

As more and more technologies are infused into service delivery, service providers must continuously renegotiate the ways in which they understand service delivery across increasingly high-tech, low-touch modalities. This exploratory qualitative study examines what health care service providers experience when offering separated services in the empirical context of telehealth. In-depth phenomenographic interviews sourced across multiple hospital and health care sites revealed that service providers experience (1) depersonalization, (2) clinical voyeurism, (3) intangibility negotiation, and (4) a need to manage change around identities and roles. These emergent understandings highlight the individual and qualitatively distinct differences in the ways in which service providers experience service separation in telehealth. Our findings address current service science priorities to leverage technology for service delivery as a way to advance separated service design. Further they provide an understanding-based approach toward building new theories from the service provider’s perspective on separation in technology-infused services. Our findings suggest strategies and tactics service providers use to overcome the potential challenges arising from not being physically colocated with their customers during service separation.

Exploring the predictors of home telehealth uptake by elderly Australian healthcare consumers

Background Despite the significant access and cost-saving potential of telehealth, the uptake of telehealth services in Australia has been sporadic. Understanding the factors that drive the uptake of home-telehealth services from the consumer perspective has received scant attention in the literature. Aim The aim of this study was to explore how a comprehensive set of factors may influence the intention of older Australians to adopt home telehealth services. Methods A survey of 306 Australians aged between 50 and 68 years was conducted to examine the influence of six categories of predictors on the intention of older Australians to adopt home telehealth: (a) demographics, (b) health status and usage, (c) mobility and ease of access to healthcare, (d) technology usage and anxiety with technology, (e) telehealth attitudes, and (f) personality traits. Results Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that significant predictors were: trust in telehealth (β = 0.35); the technology acceptance model (β = 0.27); healthcare habits (β = −0.20); dissatisfaction with traditional healthcare (β = 0.19) and online behaviors (β = 0.09). The model explained 63% of the variance in intention to adopt home telehealth. Conclusion This study is the first of its kind in Australia and provides valuable insight into the factors which impact consumer’s intention to adopt telehealth services.

Pro bono service sheds new light into commercial friendship

Providers of professional services, such as management consultants, marketing communication, and legal service firms recognize the importance of fostering long-term relationships between consultants and their clients. At a more sophisticated level, the relationship could be examined via the notion of ‘commercial friendships’. The notion suggests that both parties may derive the non-commercial value from a relationship formed for commercial reasons. However, how a non-commercial value of a business relationship is perceived by both the service providers and the clients is not well understood. In a professional service setting, providing skilled services at a reduced rate or free of charge for a client is considered a pro bono work. The value of these services remains unexplored in marketing literature. To address this gap, we conducted exploratory, qualitative research that examined the consultant–client relationship from the perspective of both individuals in a context of pro bono service.

Consumer construal of separation in virtual services

Purpose Service encounters are becoming increasingly virtual through the infusion of computer-mediated technologies. Virtual services separate consumers and service providers both spatially and temporally. With the advent of virtual services is the need to theoretically explain how service separability is psychologically perceived by consumers across the spectrum of computer-mediated technologies. Drawing on construal-level theory, the purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a theoretical framework depicting consumer’s construal of spatial and temporal separation across a continuum of technology-mediated service virtuality. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted two studies: first, to investigate consumers’ levels of mental construal associated with varying degrees of service separation across a spectrum of technology-mediated services; second, to empirically examine consumer evaluations of service quality in response to varying degrees of spatial and temporal service separation. These relationships were tested across two service industries: education and tourism. Findings Consumers mentally construe psychological distance in response to service separation and these observations vary across the spectrum of service offerings ranging from face-to-face (no psychological distance) through to virtual (spatially and temporally separated – high psychological distance) services. Further, spatial separation negatively affects consumers’ service evaluations; such that as service separation increases, consumers’ service evaluations decrease. No such significant findings support the similar effect of temporal separation on customer service evaluations. Moreover, specific service industry-based distances exist such that consumers responded differentially for a credence (education) vs an experiential (tourism) service. Originality/value Recent studies in services marketing have challenged the inseparability assumption inherent for services. This paper builds on this knowledge and is the first to integrate literature on construal-level theory, service separability, and virtual services into a holistic conceptual framework which explains variance in consumer evaluations of separated service encounters. This is important due to the increasingly virtual nature of service provider-customer interactions across a diverse range of service industries (i.e. banking and finance, tourism, education, and health care). Service providers must be cognisant of the psychological barriers which are imposed by increased technology infusion in virtual services.

Using Graph Theory to Value Paying and Nonpaying Customers in a Social Network: Linking Customer Lifetime Value to Word-of-Mouth Social Value

Taking paying customers as the point of departure, this article develops a mathematical approach linking the explicit financial worth of the paying customer (customer lifetime value) to the implicit social value of the nonpaying customer (word of mouth). When paying customers talk about their purchases in online social networks, word of mouth is spread from the paying customer to nonpaying customers (who may act on this information by either converting to a paying customer or remaining a nonpayer but spreading more word of mouth). Drawing on graph theory, we propose a conceptual method for calculating the financial value of the word of mouth shared between paying and nonpaying customers in a hypothetical social network (network value). Consequently, an aggregate metric, termed total network value, is also derived as the sum of all network value connections between paying and nonpaying customers in a social network. Implications for strategic marketing decisions and the need for empirical work are discussed.

The Threat of Terrorism and Tourist Choice Behavior

The threat of terrorism is increasingly relevant to tourism on a global scale, and no destination can claim exemption. Tourism managers need to be aware of the impact that past, current, and future terrorism events have on tourist behavior. The aim of this research is to further our understanding as to how terrorism advisory information impacts tourists’ preferences for, and trade-offs between, specific aspects of their travel. The research uses a discrete choice experiment (DCE) embedded within a classic between-subjects experimental design. US-based respondents (n = 424) completed the experiment. A random parameter logit (RPL) model is calculated to understand how tourists’ preference structures change as the threat of terrorism intensifies taking into account travel knowledge, sensation seeking, and demographic factors. Results suggest that tourist’s travel choices in relation to accommodation, independent versus group travel, cancellation policy, and price vary significantly as the threat of terrorism increases.

Service work in 2050: toward a work ecosystems perspective

The purpose of this paper is to explore the changing nature of the relationship between service workers and their work arrangements. Building upon classical and contemporary management theories and examining current trends and disruptions in employment relationships, it proposes a dynamic and relational model applicable to the management of service work in future decades (notionally in the year 2050).,This paper introduces and develops the concept of worker–ecosystem relationship as a core construct to describe the participation and productivity of workers in the significantly transformed work environment of 2050.,This paper argues that in work ecosystems – defined as relatively self-contained and self-adjusting systems – work arrangements will evolve toward less-clearly defined employment relationships characterized by long-term social contracts, tightly defined work roles and physical proximity of workers and organizations.,A novel yet theoretically rooted construct of work ecosystems is introduced, using this new lens to predict changes in the nature of service work in 2050.