Although recovery activities are primarily managed by the operations function, service recovery has received little attention in the operations management literature. This paper outlines a framework for examining the service recovery process and then reports on an empirical study to test this framework. The results not only validate much of what is anecdotally claimed by researchers and casual observers of service industries, but also highlight the role of operational activities in service recovery. The paper then points to the need for an array of operations‐based research efforts that will lead to better understanding of the recovery process and to more empirically based descriptive and prescriptive models.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine if internal integration, information sharing, and training constitute direct antecedents to organizations’ warning and recovery capabilities. Assuming that organizations periodically face various supply chain risks, the authors intend to show that managers can develop these antecedent competencies in ways that bolster their supply chain risk management (SCRM) capabilities. Design/methodology/approach To understand the relationships between the antecedents and SCRM capabilities, the authors used Q-sorts and confirmatory factor analysis to develop new warning and recovery measures. The authors then collected survey data from 231 hospital supply managers and analyzed these records using structural equation modeling. Findings The results indicate that internal integration and training positively affect organizations’ warning and recovery capabilities, in both a direct and indirect manner. The authors also illustrate how managers can leverage their SCRM capabilities to affect operational performance. Research limitations/implications These results suggest that by developing antecedent competencies like internal integration and training, firms may bolster their warning and recovery capabilities, and ultimately operational performance of the organization. Originality/value The findings provide hospital supply organizations and other inventory management teams with a novel approach to managing an evolving array of supply chain risks. Rather than investing in costly risk management techniques, like inventory stocks, organizations can use internal integration and training to improve their SCRM capabilities.

Service failures do not need to result in permanent negative consequences as long as effective recovery activities are undertaken. Unfortunately, existing research has been limited in providing information to support prescriptive approaches for applying specific service recovery techniques. By using data from a large sample (n = 861) of service failure incidents and employing the use of hierarchical and non‐hierarchical cluster analysis, this exploratory study creates and analyzes empirical types of service failures. The derived failure types, or common situations faced by service providers, focus on customer loyalty and the severity of the failure, and may be visualized in a two‐by‐two matrix. Regression analysis is then used to demonstrate how effective recovery strategies and supporting activities should vary, based on the location of the failure within the matrix. The approach and results offer important implications for strategy and service support activities as well as a foundation for systematizing service recovery efforts.

In services, which require significant customer participation to create value, customers who lack the knowledge, skills and motivation necessary to participate effectively can negatively impact service quality and cost outcomes. This paper develops a conceptual model to investigate the effectiveness of utilizing customer training and education (CTE) to improve customer readiness to provide effective behaviors in a professional service. The model was tested using survey data from patients diagnosed with diabetes who received CTE as part of their healthcare service. We found that customers who are taught why they have to perform the tasks, have higher levels of motivation to perform these tasks effectively. Further, as proposed by the customer readiness model, when their task performance is higher, they have improved health and lower healthcare costs.

The purpose of this study was to distinguish the effects of distributive, instrumental procedural, and noninstrumental (i.e. group‐value effects) procedural justice in a field study. As predicted by the group‐value model (Lind & Tyler, 1988), noninstrumental procedural justice captured unique variance in organizational commitment, turnover intentions, as well as both individual and group performance. Furthermore, noninstrumental justice explained more unique variance in commitment and performance than did distributive justice or instrumental procedural justice. These findings provide a greater understanding of why procedural justice, as a whole, has been found to be more predictive of these outcomes in prior research.