Guest editorial

Front- and back-end employee satisfaction during service transition

Purpose

Scholars studying servitization argue that manufacturers moving into services need to develop new job roles or modify existing ones, which must be enacted by employees with the right mentality, skill sets, attitudes and capabilities. However, there is a paucity of empirical research on how such changes affect employee-level outcomes.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors theorize that job enrichment and role stress act as countervailing forces during the manufacturer's service transition, with implications for employee satisfaction. The authors test the hypotheses using a sample of 21,869 employees from 201 American manufacturers that declared revenues from services over a 10-year period.

Findings

The authors find an inverted U-shaped relationship between the firm's level of service infusion and individual employee satisfaction, which is flatter for front-end staff. This relationship differs in shape and/or magnitude between firms, highlighting the role of unobserved firm-level idiosyncratic factors.

Practical implications

Servitized manufacturers, especially those in the later stage of their transition (i.e. when services start to account for more than 50% of annual revenues), should try to ameliorate their employees' role-induced stress to counter a drop in satisfaction.

Originality/value

This is one of the first studies to examine systematically the relationship between servitization and individual employee satisfaction. It shows that back-end employees in manufacturing firms are considerably affected by an increasing emphasis on services, while past literature has almost exclusively been concerned with front-end staff.

Unfolding the simple heuristics of smart solution development

Purpose

The present study intends to foster understanding of how a traditional manufacturer can utilize the “simple rules” approach of managerial heuristics to facilitate its smart solution development (SSD) process.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses an in-depth single case research strategy and 25 senior manager interviews to understand the application of simple rules in smart solution development.

Findings

The findings reveal process, boundary, preference, schedule, and stop rules as the dominant managerial heuristics in the case and identify how the manufacturer applies these rules during the innovation process phases of ideation, incubation, transformation, and industrialization for attaining project outcomes.

Research limitations/implications

The study contributes to the new service development (NSD) literature by shedding light on simple rules and how managers may apply them to facilitate SSD. The main limitations stem from applying the qualitative case study approach and the interpretative nature of the study, which produces novel insights but prevents direct generalization to other empirical cases.

Practical implications

The resulting framework provides guidelines for managers on how to establish formal and clear simple rules that enable industrial solution providers to approach decision-making in smart solution development in a more agile manner.

Originality/value

The study comprises one of the first attempts to investigate managerial heuristics in the context of SSD and puts forward a plea for further NSD research applying psychological conceptualizations to enrich the simple rules perspective.