Search results

Traditional brick‐and‐mortar companies are embracing the use of modern technologies to enhance the services they offer and to gain customer loyalty. The objectives are to stay in the forefront of today’s marketplace and to improve service, efficiency, and profitability. The hospitality industry has transformed itself into a global industry, and, as one of the largest industries in the world, it serves as an excellent example of an industry that has transformed itself in response to changes in customer requirements and demands. Continuous technological developments and their adoption in the hospitality industry have provided numerous opportunities and challenges. This paper examines the perceptions of international hotel managers on the adoption of technology in their hotels. The results emphasise the growing demand of hotel customers for various technology‐supported services. Technology is found to have affected the ability of hotels to support employees, enhance the quality of service, improve efficiencies, gain competitive advantage, maintain relationships with customers, and increase profitability.

Intercultural contact occurs on a daily basis across all facets of life, and is reflective of Australia’s multicultural society. This trend is observed in many Western industrialised nations and has contributed to a growing body of research and literature in the field of managing cultural diversity. While much of this research is focused on the internal context of the workplace, relatively little attention has been given to the impact of culture on the service provider and customer interface. In an effort to shed some light on the service experiences of culturally diverse customers, a series of exploratory interviews were conducted. The findings suggest that on the basis of service provider behaviors (both verbal and nonverbal), culturally diverse customers perceive they are the recipients of inequitable service and consequently experience low levels of satisfaction.

The paper seeks to obtain a better understanding of the extent to which service quality permeates within the Malaysian public service sector by drawing on management and customer perceptions of service quality.

Two separate surveys were distributed to managers and customers across 86 branches of a public sector department within the Malaysian Ministry. The manager survey comprised instruments relating to organisational service performance, while the customer survey contained instruments relating to service quality and customer satisfaction. A total of 430 manager and customer surveys were completed, representing a 95 percent response rate.

The results support the conceptual model in demonstrating a strong correlation between service quality dimensions, service performance and customer satisfaction. In particular, service providers classified as “excellent” were rated most favourably in terms of responsiveness, access and credibility.

The generalisability of the results is limited by the absence of the employees' perception of service quality.

This research adds to the body of knowledge relating to public service quality management.

The originality of this paper lies within the context in which this study took place. The study addresses key relationships between service dimensions, service performance and service quality within the Malaysian public service sector. Although previous research has addressed similar issues within the context of the public sector, relatively few studies pertain directly to Malaysian public services.

Computer‐mediated business transactions have transformed the relationship between buyer and seller, and have revolutionised the procurement process. Through the advent of electronic marketplaces (e‐markets), buyers and sellers are offered an alternative to the traditional business‐to‐business relationship. Regarded as a new efficient way to communicate, advertise, and distribute, e‐marketplaces provide both parties with global access together with reduced transaction costs. This paper reports on the e‐market experiences of an Australian manufacturer of mining equipment, Ludowici Mineral Processing Pty Ltd, in its association with an e‐marketplace, Quadrem, and the benefits reaped from the relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a research study aimed at comparing the causes of organisational decline and turnaround strategies involved in cases of successful and unsuccessful turnarounds, with a view to identifying the differences, if any, between the two groups, which in turn is expected to provide useful information to academics, practitioners and policy makers.

Since turnaround is a business phenomenon of general interest, their stories are often published in business periodicals, which are a rich source of data on them. In order to tap this data source, the present paper employed a method of content analysis for the proposed investigation on the cause of organisational decline and turnaround strategies used. In order to quantify the data, a three-point scale was developed, where the presence of a cause/strategy is rated as “3”, its ambivalence as “2” and its absence as “1”, whose validity was assessed through the inter-rater agreement indices. The data thus generated are amenable to statistical analyses, using which the more commonly prevalent causes of organisational decline and the strategies commonly employed for turnaround by the successful and unsuccessful companies are identified.

The findings of the present study have generated a few useful insights. First, the primary causes for organisational decline are the internal weaknesses of the organisation; in fact the external changes can adversely affect the organisation only if it is internally weak. Second, organisational decline caused by multiple factors (which is usually the case) can be managed effectively by adopting a variety of strategies; hence a single-pronged strategy is often found to be ineffective. Third, the more successful turnarounds had a diverse portfolio of strategies including those of institution-building, often employed in a phased manner, consistent with the stage theories of turnaround.

The limitations of this research arise mainly from the generation of data from published sources and the consequent biases, which can be managed, to a large extent, by using multiple sources for the same case for reducing the publishers’ biases as well as by having multiple raters for identifying the researcher’s biases, if any.

The study has highlighted the need for addressing the internal causes of organisational decline on a priority-basis rather than blaming the external factors, besides pointing to the need for adopting a variety of strategies for dealing with the diversity of causes affecting the organisation’s health, particularly the need for institutionalising the changes. These findings can be of help especially to turnaround managers and policy-makers in dealing with organisational decline and thus contribute to the creation and enhancement of economic value.

Despite more than 50 years of research into gender and work, the impact of female expatriates persists to be underrepresented in mainstream international human resource management (IHRM) literature. The purpose of this paper is to identify and explore the perceptions of married Indian information technology (IT) women regarding career and expatriating discussions they have with their husbands and its impact on their decision making to undertake international assignments.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 married Indian IT women who had undertaken international assignments after marriage. The study includes two data sets, 1: women on less than one-year assignment; 2: women on greater than one-year assignments.

The study found that women who went on short-term assignments of less than one year travelled alone and found it fortunate and convenient to leave their children in the care of their husbands, in-laws, parents and maids. While in the cases of women travelling for longer-term assignments, most husbands accompanied them. The study suggests that while spousal support was the key, having a shared purpose with husbands along with extended family support was equally significant to facilitate women undertaking an international assignment. As an impetus, the authors note a change within the Indian society where both partners come together to make decisions about expatriating.

The authors discuss the implications for IHRM as they relate to gender diversity within organisations.

The research, underpinned by the early workings of a theory of career hierarchy, explores the complexities in expatriation decision-making processes of married women from the emerging economy of India with traditional family values, who are working within a modern and liberal IT industry.