Effects of Service Standards Communication and Servant Leadership on Strategic Competence and Customer Orientation

Service standards communication and servant leadership are both important mechanisms to improve an organization＇s service process. Therefore, they are likely to affect strategic competence and customer orientation skills of organizations. In this research, customer orientation and strategic competence are undertaken in relation with servant leadership and service standards communication, using a sample of 106 Turkish firms＇ executive assistants. The results prove that service standards communication and servant leadership have a strong positive relationship with both strategic competence and customer orientation.

How does a data strategy enable customer value?The case of FinTechs and traditional banks under the open finance framework

The coupling of data and digital innovation opens the way for new business in the financial services sector,where customers are placed at the centre of decisions and data can help to develop customer knowledge.To carry out our research,we adopted a multi-case study approach to explore how a data strategy is developed in the retail banking industry,together with its relationship with customer value,paying particular attention to the heterogeneity between traditional banks and financial technology companies(FinTechs).Two main points emerged from the study.Firstly,there are three possible approaches to Open Finance,which are mainly defined by their different corporate cultures,organisational configurations,technological architecture and data value.Secondly,it is not enough to be a FinTech to be best placed to exploit the market,as some traditional banks share the FinTechs’approach to Open Finance.Designing new tailored products,customising their prices and offering them over the right channels through targeted communication are all data-driven initiatives that stem from cross-or up-selling potential,core to the retail banking industry for turning a customer into a cash flow,thus enabling value to be created for customers.Our findings additionally revealed that there is a form of external information asymmetry between the customer and the bank,and that there is also an internal asymmetry between bank departments,as their visibility on information about the same customer may differ.

Do Personality Variables Predict Job Embeddedness and Proclivity to Be Absent from Work?

The current knowledge base lacks evidence about situational-and surface-level personality variables and their impacts on job embeddedness and proclivity to be absent from work.With this recognition,drawing from the hierarchical personality model and fit theory as well as job embeddedness theory,our paper explores the influences of job resourcefulness(JR)and customer orientation(CO)on job embeddedness and propensity to be absent from work.We tapped time-lagged data gathered from hotel customer-contact employees in the United Arab Emirates to assess the aforementioned linkages via structural equation modeling.CO is a complete mediator between JR and job embeddedness,while job embeddedness completely mediates the linkage between CO and absence intentions.Specifically,hotel employees who can work under a resource-depleted environment are high on CO and therefore display job embeddedness at elevated levels.In addition,customer-oriented hotel employees have higher job embeddedness and therefore exhibit lower absence intentions.