“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Albert Einstein
By Jens Hogreve and Anja Iseke, winner of the 2017 Best Service Article Award
When Werner Kunz asked us to write a short piece on our article that won the 2017 Best Service Article Award, all the memories of the wonderful evening at the 2018 Frontiers Conference in Austin, Texas, reemerged. It has been and remains a great honor to join that line of remarkable and outstanding scholars in our field. Thank you to everyone who supported us on the very long journey that brought us here.
The above quote, from Albert Einstein, perfectly describes what we especially needed (among other things) in this exciting but sometimes exhausting research process: persistence. Here, we want to share with you the journey of our Service Profit Chain (SPC) article. How did we start? To remember, we had to dig very deep in our “archives.” What we found was that the idea to conduct a meta-analysis on the SPC was not our original idea. Initially, we wanted to test the full SPC framework in a single empirical study. As a first step, we found and collaborated with a global call center company that shared our vision and enthusiasm. However, it turned out that we were naïve. After nine months of hard work and conducting an extensive qualitative pre-study, our primary contact left his position and the project was canceled. This was in 2010. But we had learned from our supervisors and many other experienced scholars that conviction and stamina is one of the most important success factors in academia, and we decided to go on.
We were convinced that we could address an important research gap in the service literature via a meta-analysis of the SPC. Our enthusiasm was also sparked by the fact that the SPC has been an excellent guidepost for thinking in interdisciplinary ways. It elegantly connects management, organizational behavior, marketing, and service research: it extends marketing and service research to focus on human resource instruments (internal marketing) as determinants of service quality (via employee attitudes and behavior). Likewise, it expands the human resource and organizational behavior perspective to consider customer satisfaction and loyalty as relevant outcomes of both HR instruments and employee attitudes and behavior.
In academia and managerial practice alike, important issues that might be best addressed with an interdisciplinary approach are often discussed instead in isolation, within focused silos such as human resources, marketing, or sales. This might increase efficiency, but in many ways, it is not effective. This is something the original authors of the SPC wanted to address. They suggested that managers (and researchers) may be more successful if they take a holistic view and collaborate across functions and disciplines. The SPC, with its convincing and easy-to-follow statements, makes the clear statement that for long-term success, company leadership should focus on both the internal and the external functions. That is easily said but difficult to achieve in practice. And it may be an important reason the SPC has rarely been tested empirically.
From the beginning, this project has been truly interdisciplinary, involving scholars from accounting, human resource management, organizational behavior, and marketing working together as a team. Working in heterogeneous teams has its drawbacks and pushbacks, but by the end of the project, we all as participants agreed that it was one of the best experiences in our academic lives so far – and not only because we received this prestigious award. From an efficiency perspective, research fields – for good reasons – have visible and invisible boundaries that help us focus on important subjects and establish standards and common understandings. Sharp focus makes research faster and allows us to deepen our knowledge. Interdisciplinary collaboration, in contrast, enables research to cross boundaries and takes a broader view, uncovering additional relationships and identifying relevant determinants and outcomes of the concepts of interest. Honestly, without working as an interdisciplinary team, we would not have been able to cover the relevant research, which was oftentimes not directly associated with the SPC framework. Furthermore, we would not have been open to the new light that was shed on several of the SPC paths we researched, and we would not have thought about innovative explanations for the non-intuitive results that emerged from our data. Finally, we would never have been able to publish our idea.
The reader should not get us wrong: this has not been an easy path and it took its time, but we all learned a lot. As a team, we have discussed our biggest learnings, and we all agreed that crossing boundaries between fields and delving into other disciplines allowed us to see the similarities of and compatibility between concepts and theories across the various fields of management research. However, we also had to be aware of the differences between the disciplines. For example, we sometimes use very different expressions for the same constructs (e.g., HR instruments vs. internal marketing). We also use similar names for concepts that are related but distinct (employee loyalty is different from customer loyalty; choosing and remaining in a job is different from choosing or remaining with a service). Moreover, conducting a meta-analysis on the SPC required us to explore a very large body of research and integrate various research streams. It took a lot of stamina, openness, and empathy to finish the project.
Another important aspect of successful interdisciplinary research is feedback and support. Various colleagues provided valuable feedback along the way. Finally, we were lucky to encounter editors who were willing to take risks and encourage us to cross these boundaries. At the Journal of Marketing, we had a tremendous and very supportive editor and reviewer team that guided us through the process, helping us to improve the paper considerably.
In a nutshell, these thoughts should not be understood as a call for everyone to engage in interdisciplinary work. We all know it is necessary to stay in clearly demarcated fields of research and dig deeper to better understand specific topics. But for a research field to develop, prosper, and benefit from insights gained in related areas, it is also important to broaden our perspective and engage in interdisciplinary projects. So, at least from time to time, take the risk – our understanding will benefit from it.
Jens Hogreve
Professor and Chair of Service Management
Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
WFI – Ingolstadt School of Management
Anja Iseke
Department of Production and Management
Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences
Lemgo, Germany
Photo by Sharon Pittaway on Unsplash
