The literature on organization design has been dominated by descriptive models in its dealing with structure and operations. This paper takes an alternative view advocating the use of a normative model to be used in the design of service organizations. This model sees the extent of customer...

This research provides an empirically derived measurement model for customer contact, a widely used construct in service management. The model was created by applying two psychometric scaling techniques, Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) and the method of paired comparisons, and Content Analysis,...

No abstract available.

We conceptualize strategic decision-making processes within a manufacturing firm as streams of resources allocated to short- and long-term changes. The analogous ecological model, referred to as the Lotka-Volterra model, captures this dynamic tension between decisions made by the firm and its...

Cooperation and coordination among employees can yield significant productivity gains. In this study, we explore the design of optimal incentive systems that induce task-related effort, helping, and knowledge sharing within workgroups. We identify three distinct types of employee linkages that...

This paper focuses on an important new service management strategy: the operations capabilities-service quality-performance (C-SQ-P) triad. In order to understand what generic operations capabilities influence the strategic behavior of high performing service firms, we explore three related...

This paper describes the development and analysis of a numerical taxonomy of manufacturing strategies. The taxonomy was developed with standard methods of cluster analysis, and is based on the relative importance attached to eleven competitive capabilities defining the manufacturing task of 164...