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PurposeResearch on the service–profit chain (SPC) provides important insights regarding how organizations attain service excellence. However, this research stream does not shed light on the mechanisms by which service organizations sustain such excellence, despite the struggles of many organizations to do so. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop the SPC as a more dynamic system characterized by feedback loops, accumulation processes, and time delays based on the service operations, human resources, and marketing literatures.Design/methodology/approachThe authors posit the feedback loops operate as virtuous cycles, such that increases in customer perceptions of service quality and in profit margins lead to subsequent increases in the quality of the internal working environment, which ultimately reimpacts performance in a positive way, and so on. The authors test the hypotheses using five years of archival data on 417 full-service US hotels. The unique data set combines longitudinal data from multiple functions, including employee assessments regarding their tools, practices, and abilities to serve customers, customer perceptions of service quality, and objective measures of financial performance.FindingsThe authors find support for the idea that some organizations provide customers with high-quality service over time by reinvesting in the inputs responsible for generating the initial success, i.e., in various aspects of the internal working environment.Research limitations/implicationsThe analysis of 417 hotels from a single firm may influence the extent to which the findings can be generalized.Originality/valueBy expanding the boundaries of previous conceptual and empirical models investigating SPCs, the authors offer a deeper understanding of the cross-functional character of modern operational systems and the complex dynamics that these systems generate.

Despite early hopes that the internet would facilitate more socially equitable communication, many age-old forms of discrimination appear to have been preserved. Men are routinely aggressive towards women, experienced users harass newcomers, and young people dominate new social and entertainment media. The current study statistically examines peer scoring and reviewing behavior by over 300,000 users of a prominent new media website over a seven-year period in terms of the gender and age of the users. Findings support previous research on male bias online as well as reveal a complex age hierarchy with gender interactions, which became rather homogeneous over time for all users except older males.

Like its bestselling predecessor, Multilevel Modeling Using R, Second Edition provides the reader with a helpful guide to conducting multilevel data modeling using the R software environment. After reviewing standard linear models, the authors present the basics of multilevel models and explain how to fit these models using R. They then show how to employ multilevel modeling with longitudinal data and demonstrate the valuable graphical options in R. The book also describes models for categorical dependent variables in both single level and multilevel data. This thoroughly updated revision gives the reader state-of-the-art tools to launch their own investigations in multilevel modeling and gain insight into their research.

AbstractThe significance of information technology (IT) to organizational performance is increasingly acknowledged by senior executives and scholars alike. However, an important aspect that is underdeveloped in the extant literature is whether and how an organization's IT sourcing strategy affects performance. We examine this dimension in the context of hospitals' sourcing strategy for electronic medical record (EMR) systems. Leveraging the organization‐IT alignment principle grounded in contingency theory, we argue that the sourcing strategy chosen by hospitals impacts the quality of patient care rendered and that the nature of this relationship has changed over time. Using data on US hospitals that operated continuously from 2006 to 2013 and employing a multilevel longitudinal modeling framework to analyze change over time, we examine how a key dimension of the sourcing strategy for EMR systems—change in closeness to single‐sourcing—impacts conformance quality, a critical measure of hospital performance that assesses how frequently hospitals comply with evidence‐based practices. We find that a change closer to single‐sourcing is positively associated with conformance quality, but this positive effect is reduced over time, meaning that the benefits realized by hospitals using a single‐sourcing approach diminish toward the end of our observation period. As explicated in our discussion of results, findings from our research reveal critical insights about how sourcing decisions impact performance, and how these effects evolve over time due to changes in regulations, technology, and competition.

Which employees are likely to warn leaders about threats to the workplace? When employees do speak up, will these messages gain the leader's interest? In this article, we rely on theories of power to predict how employee characteristics (work prevention regulatory focus, closeness to the leader (leader-member exchange) and rank) influence whether employees send messages about threats (prohibitive voice). We also explore whether employee characteristics (closeness to the leader and rank) affect leaders' attention to threat messages. In a two-wave field study with 55 leaders and 214 employees, we found that leaders were more likely to show interest in messages about threats from employees who they were not close to, but who had high rank. However, only employees with a strong work prevention regulatory focus and/or those of higher rank were likely to prioritize the sending of such messages. Although we also expected that employees who had a good relationship with the leader would send more information about threats, we found they were less likely to do so. This research suggests that there may be "opaque zones" in organizations, places where employees are unlikely to warn leaders about threats and where leaders will not pay attention even if they do.