Susan Meyer Goldstein

The service concept: the missing link in service design research?

The service concept plays a key role in service design and development. But while the term is used frequently in the service design and new service development literature, surprisingly little has been written about the service concept itself and its important role in service design and development. The service concept defines the how and the what of service design, and helps mediate between customer needs and an organization’s strategic intent. We define the service concept and describe how it can be used to enhance a variety of service design processes. As illustrations here, we apply the service concept to service design planning and service recovery design processes. Employing the service concept as an important driver of service design decisions raises a number of interesting questions for research which are discussed here.

The Role of Culture as Driver of Quality Management and Performance: Infrastructure Versus Core Quality Practices*

Increasingly, scholars and practitioners recognize the importance of understanding organizational culture when implementing operations management practices. This study investigates the relationships among organizational culture, infrastructure and core quality management practices, and manufacturing performance using two alternative models. Understanding these relationships is important because culture can provide insight into the context dependence of quality management practices and shed light on the mixed results of past studies concerning the link between quality management and performance. Analysis of manufacturing plants from six countries indicates that organizational culture has a stronger influence on infrastructure quality management practices than on core quality management practices, regardless of whether the plants are located in Eastern or Western countries. In addition, infrastructure quality management practices have a significant effect on manufacturing performance. These results contribute to the quality management literature by emphasizing the importance of accounting for culture when making decisions to implement quality management practices to achieve a performance advantage. Finally, we also contribute to the literature on the culture–performance linkage by finding support for a direct link between culture and manufacturing performance.

The effect of location, strategy, and operations technology on hospital performance

Abstract Hospitals in the US are faced with challenges in how to compete and remain viable in an increasingly competitive environment. Using data from a primary survey of hospitals and from various secondary sources, we investigate the incremental effects on hospital performance of location, strategy, and technology. We find that hospital location is significantly related to performance, but that a hospital’s choice of strategy can moderate the effect of location. Additionally, we find hospitals that invest more extensively in clinical technologies tend to be better performers regardless of location. Hospital size, measured as number of beds, captures the effects of location and technology investment in accounting for a major portion of hospital performance. While we cannot argue that larger is always better for hospitals, mergers, partnerships, and other forms of consolidation currently observed in the marketplace indicate that managers in the hospital industry understand the advantage of size.

Empirical support for the Baldrige Award framework in U.S. hospitals.

Examined are relationships among constructs in the Baldrige Award Health Care Criteria framework to investigate whether quality management systems are related to organizational results and customer satisfaction in hospitals. Measures for the 19 dimensions of the Baldrige Criteria are obtained from 220 U.S. hospitals. This study provides empirical evidence that focusing on the content addressed in the Baldrige Criteria leads hospitals to improvement on some dimensions of performance.

Explaining Anomalous High Performance in a Health Care Supply Chain

An implicit assumption in distributing and coordinating work among independent organizations in a supply chain is that a focal organization can use financial or contractual mechanisms to enforce compliance among the other organizations in meeting desired performance objectives. Absent contractual agreement or financial gain, there is little incentive for independent organizations to coordinate their process improvement activities. In this study, we examine a health care supply chain in which the work is distributed among independent organizations. We use a detailed case study and an abductive reasoning approach to understand how and why the independent organizations choose to coordinate and collaborate in their work. Our study makes two contributions to the literature. First, we use well-established lean principles to explain how independent organizations achieve superior performance despite highly uncertain and variable customer demand—a context considerably different from the origins of lean principles. Second, we forward relational coordination theory to explain why the organizations in this decentralized supply chain coordinate their work. Relational coordination includes the use of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect for one anothers work as primary mechanisms to explain process improvement in the absence of any contractual incentives. Our study constitutes a first step in generating theory for work design and its improvement in decentralized supply chains.

A Methodology for Constructing Collective Causal Maps

This article develops a new approach for constructing causal maps called the Collective Causal Mapping Methodology (CCMM). This methodology collects information asynchronously from a group of dispersed and diverse subject-matter experts via Web technologies. Through three rounds of data collection, analysis, mapping, and interpretation, CCMM constructs a parsimonious collective causal map. The article illustrates the CCMM by constructing a causal map as a teaching tool for the field of operations management. Causal maps are an essential tool for managers who seek to improve complex systems in the areas of quality, strategy, and information systems. These causal maps are known by many names, including Ishikawa (fishbone) diagrams, cause-and-effect diagrams, impact wheels, issue trees, strategy maps, and risk-assessment mapping tools. Causal maps can be used by managers to focus attention on the root causes of a problem, find critical control points, guide risk management and risk mitigation efforts, formulate and communicate strategy, and teach the fundamental causal relationships in a complex system. Only two basic methods for creating causal maps are available to managers today-brainstorming and interviews. However, these methods are limited, particularly when the subject-matter experts cannot easily meet in the same place at the same time. Managers working with complex systems across large, geographically dispersed organizations can employ the CCMM presented here to efficiently and effectively construct causal maps to facilitate improving their systems.

Performance Effects of Physicians’ Involvement in Hospital Strategic Decisions

In recent years, many hospitals have moved to a professional management model from one of physician dominance. One result has been that physicians in some hospitals are alienated from the strategic processes of the hospital. Extant literature suggests that both physician involvement in strategic processes and investment in capability-building programs are associated with improved performance. The literature also suggests that there is an interaction between physician involvement and capability-building investments that is positively associated with performance. We explore these notions empirically using data from a sample of hospitals to evaluate the extent to which physician involvement in strategic decision making and investments in operational capabilities are associated with hospital performance. Results indicate that such proactive involvement of physicians in strategic decision making significantly affects hospital performance. In addition, investments in capability building related to employee development also affect hospital performance.

Civilian-military pooling of health care resources in Haiti: a theory of complementarities perspective

The 2010 Haiti earthquake brought attention to the global need for rapid deployment of disaster relief health care services. In such large-scale disasters, a variety of international organisations provide temporary services until the damaged local health care system recovers. However, the disaster environment can pose operational and temporal challenges that may impede the effectiveness of relief services, and research is needed to provide both theory and methods for improving coordination and collaboration among relief organisations. This study investigates opportunities and barriers for relief organisations to pool complementary resources originating from multiple countries, by examining five case studies that represent the breadth of organizational types, including charter (civilian, military, university-affiliated and public/private), facility type (primary, secondary, and tertiary care), and duration of stay. The study yields a set of research propositions that chart avenues for future studies in this emerging field of research at the intersection of health care humanitarian operations and organisation theory.

Service operations: what’s next?

The purpose of this paper is to present exciting and innovative research questions in service operations that are aligned with eight key themes and related topics determined by the Journal of Service Management (JOSM) Service Operations Expert Research Panel. By offering a good number of such research questions, this paper provides a broad range of ideas to spur conceptual and empirical research related to service operations and encourage the continued creation of deep knowledge within the field, as well as collaborative research across disciplines that develops and incorporates insights from service operations.,Based on a Delphi study, described in the companion article, “Service Operations: What Have We Learned?,” the panel identified eight key research themes in service operations where leading-edge research is being done or has yet to be done (Victorino et al., 2018). In this paper, three or four topics within each theme are selected and multiple questions for each topic are proposed to guide research efforts. The topics and questions, while wide-ranging, are only representative of the many ongoing research opportunities related to service operations.,The field of service operations has many interesting research topics and questions that are largely unexplored. Furthermore, these research areas are not only increasingly integrative across multiple themes within operations but often transcend functional disciplines. This creates opportunities for ever more impactful research with a greater reach throughout the service system and suggests that service researchers, regardless of functional affiliation, can contribute to the ongoing conversation on the role of service operations in value creation.,Leveraging the collective knowledge of the JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel to expand on the research themes generated from the Delphi study, novel questions for future study are put forward. Recognizing that the number of potential research questions is virtually unlimited, summary questions by theme and topic are also provided. These questions represent a synopsis of the individual questions and can serve as a quick reference guide for researchers interested in pursuing new directions in conceptual and empirical research in service operations. This summary also serves as a framework to facilitate the formulation of additional research topics and questions.

Service operations: what have we learned?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify research themes in service operations that have great potential for exciting and innovative conceptual and empirical work. To frame these research themes, the paper provides a systematic literature review of operations articles published in the Journal of Service Management (JOSM). The thorough review of published work in JOSM and proposed research themes are presented in hopes that they will inspire impactful research on service operations. These themes are further developed in a companion paper, “Service operations: what’s next?” (Field et al., 2018). Design/methodology/approach The JOSM Service Operations Expert Research Panel conducted a Delphi study to generate research themes where leading-edge research on service operations is being done or has yet to be done. Nearly 700 articles published in JOSM from its inception through 2016 were reviewed and classified by discipline focus. The subset of service operations articles was then further categorized according to the eight identified research themes plus an additional category that primarily represented traditional manufacturing approaches applied in service settings. Findings From the Delphi study, the following key themes emerged: service supply networks, evaluating and measuring service operations performance, understanding customer and employee behavior in service operations, managing servitization, managing knowledge-based service contexts, managing participation roles and responsibilities in service operations, addressing society’s challenges through service operations, and the operational implications of the sharing economy. Based on the literature review, approximately 20 percent of the published work in JOSM is operations focused, with earlier articles predominantly applying traditional manufacturing approaches in service settings. However, the percentage of these traditional types of articles has been steadily decreasing, suggesting a trend toward dedicated research frameworks and themes that are unique to the design and management of services operations. Originality/value The paper presents key research themes for advancing conceptual and empirical research on service operations. Additionally, a review of the past and current landscape of operations articles published in JOSM offers an understanding of the scholarly conversation so far and sets a foundation from which to build future research.