Strategic positioning, human capital, and performance in service organizations: a customer interaction approach

Abstract

This study employs a customer interaction approach to examine how service organizations' strategic positioning relates to their human capital, and how the interaction between strategic positioning and human capital impacts organizational performance. Results from 234 service organizations in 96 different industries indicate very strong relationships between strategic positioning choices and human capital. We also find that certain combinations of strategic positioning and human capital result in superior performance. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Workplace Family Resources and Service Performance: The Mediating Role of Work Engagement

“…While these behaviors may enhance the search process and consequently generate solutions to customers' needs, engaged frontline employees must also have the requisite expertise in order to answer customers' questions satisfactorily as well as to ask the right questions (Skaggs & Youndt, 2004;Stock & Hoyer, 2005). This expertise is necessary to develop the customer need knowledge required to customize service delivery and meet customers' unique needs.…”

Multi-item models for evaluating managerial and organizational resources in service firms

“…In spite of the former evidences, the interest of the research community in developing theoretical frameworks and management tools which take into account the distinctive features of service business dates back to two decades ago: 'Quality Service' (Zeithaml et al 1990), 'Service Encounter' or 'Customer Contact' (Soteriou and Chase 1998;Skaggs and Huffman 2003;Skaggs and Youndt 2004) and 'Service Operations Management' (Biolos 2002;Bretthauer 2004) are the three veins of research which analyze different aspects of the service industry at the operational level.…”

Intellectual capital in family firms: human capital identification and measurement

“…Some of these intangibles of a more explicit nature have previously been measured in the literature about human capital -and it is common to find indicators related to the educational level or experience of human resources, measured according to the number of academic qualification or the years spent working for the firm, respectively (Skaggs and Youndt, 2004;Hatch and Dyer, 2004;Hitt et al, 2001;Gimeno et al, 1997). However, our purpose in this paper is more ambitious, since an attempt has been made to identify those intangibles of a more tacit nature which characterise the human capital of family firms; hence the novelty of this work, which also represents its greatest difficulty.…”