The service profit chain is a simple conceptual framework linking employee satisfaction and loyalty, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and financial performance. Although widely used by practitioners, the service profit chain's series of hypothesized relationships between employee, customer, and financial outcomes has not been rigorously tested using data that span all components of the model. Panel data from the branches of a large regional bank are used to test individually each of the service profit chain's constituent hypotheses. The results generally support the model, but there are some exceptions. Further work is needed to refine and simplify several critical measures and to enhance the analysis to test the service profit chain as a complete system of related hypotheses.
This paper compares changes in the structure of wages in France, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States over the last twenty years. Wage differentials by education and occupation (skill differentials) narrowed substantially in all four countries in the 1970s. Overall wage inequality and skill differentials expanded dramatically in Great Britain and the United States and moderately in Japan during the 1980s. In contrast, wage inequality did not increase much in France through the mid-1980s. Industrial and occupational shifts favored mom-educated workers in all four countries throughout the last twenty years. Reductions in the rate of the growth of the relative supply of college-educated workers in the face of persistent increases in the relative demand for more-skilled labor can explain a substantial portion of the increase in educational wage differentials in the United States, Britain, arid Japan in the 1980s. Sharp increases in the national minimum wage (the SMIC) and the ability of French unions to extend contracts even in the face of declining membership helped prevent wage differentials from expanding in France through the mid-1980s.
The demographic changes currently underway in the United States have been widely anticipated and discussed by scholars and practitioners, but little is known about what impacts, if any, have already been experienced by employers. This article reports on a field study that asked managers in large US corporations to describe how and to what extent demographic changes have affected their businesses. Changing work force demographics were interpreted by managers as having two distinct components: a reduction in the growth rate and quality of potential employees, and increased gender, ethnic, and age diversity. While most firms reported managerial challenges from increased diversity, none characterized it as a serious business problem. A lack of sufficiently skilled workers for increasingly complex jobs, conversely, was seen as a major, ongoing problem.
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