Interview by Linda Nasr with Mahesh Subramony.
Mahesh Subramony and S. Douglas Pugh published this year in the Journal of Management: Services Management Research – Review, Integration, and Future Directions, vol. 41, no. 1, 349-373. http://jom.sagepub.com/content/41/1/349.abstract
How did the idea of this article come to you? Why did you want to write this article?
The idea for this article came to me as my co-author Doug Pugh and I discussed the diverse strands of management literature dealing with services, and realized that there was no integrated perspective or ‘overarching theory’ in this field. Instead, we noticed that different researchers were dedicated to their own specialities and treated service either as a context (e.g., studying employee attitudes or emotions in restaurants or retail) or as a convenient source of outcome measures (e.g., customer satisfaction or service failure). So, in order to find common themes in this work, we decided to take a large swath of published research, i.e., 102 empirical articles published in more than a dozen organizational behaviour (OB) and management journals, and analysed these for common themes and content.
Why this article? Using an organic analogy, research studies are the life-blood of our field while literature reviews and theoretical articles constitute its heart! The way the heart pumps and purifies blood, these articles filter and contextualize existing findings, and then deliver new ideas and research opportunities to the rest of the ‘body’ of literature. This was an incredible opportunity for us to understand and shape the literature on services within the management discipline!
How does this article contribute to services research?
First, it integrates the major empirical and theoretical work done by management researchers within the services domain. We have rich bodies of research examining how employees and customers transmit their emotions to each other (emotional contagion), how employees manage the emotional demands of service delivery (emotional labor and emotions management), how employee traits influence service delivery, how the quality of organization-employee relationships spills over into customer-directed behaviors, etc. Similarly, at the organization-level of analysis, we have these studies linking human resource management (HRM) practices, service climate, and leadership, with customer outcomes. Then, there is a relative new area of ‘multilevel’ research looking at the relationship between organizational practices and employee-customer interactions. Our paper integrates all these bodies of literature that have, in general, developed in parallel.
Second, this article examines opportunities for collaboration between management and marketing researchers in relatively developed areas of research (e.g., linking customer/market orientation with service climate and HRM practices), emergent areas (e.g., transformative services), and untapped domains (e.g., service dominant logic and human capital resources theory).
Third, we propose new frontiers for services management theory building and research – some of which must be familiar to our marketing readers. These include, virtual service settings, relational services as opposed to service transactions, services delivered by the contingent workforce (i.e., temporary employees), etc.
What is your vision for where the service community is or should be going?
First, echoing Mary Jo Bitner: It is truly “a wonderful time to be a service researcher”! But it is also a time for reflection and agenda setting. I am generalizing here, but we as a community have mostly taken on a commercial orientation with a focus on improving employee and customer wellbeing in order to further the financial outcomes of businesses. That is a perfectly legitimate perspective. But, it is also time for us to think about services in a broader sense, i.e., in terms of new contexts such as non-profits, social entrepreneurs; new customers such as under-served populations, those with differing abilities, the demographically diverse; and new perspectives such as viewing service establishments as communities, not just commercial enterprises.
We see this broadening of the services concept with service-dominant logic, transformative services, bottom-of-the-pyramid approaches, etc., but I believe that the scope of this discourse needs to be even broader and take place within an inter-disciplinary context, i.e., between services marketing researchers, management (OB, HRM, Strategy) scholars, those in the management sciences, social scientists, and yes – business professionals and policy wonks.
Our journals and conferences can facilitate systematic dialogues or symposia, but we as individuals do not have to wait. I suggest that we walk up to our colleagues in management/marketing/operations, or sociology or healthcare and ask them about their concerns and developments within their fields, and suggest collaborative work. Services constitute a broad domain of human conduct, and all of us working together can create not just better theory or more interesting research – we can truly have an impact on the world that we live in.
Mahesh Subramony
is Associate Professor
at the College of Business
Department of Management Northern Illinois University
Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/buckaroobay
