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The growing importance of the service sector in almost every economy in the world has created a significant amount of interest in service operations. In practice, many service sectors have sought and made use of various enhancement programs to improve their operations and performance in an attempt to hold competitive success. As most researchers recognize, service operations link with customers. The customers as participants act in the service operations system driven by the goal of sufficing his/her added values. This is one of the distinctive features of service production and consumption. In the paper, first, we propose the idea of service operations improvement by mapping objectively the service experience of customers from the view of customer journey. Second, a portraying scheme of service experience of customers based on the IDEF3 technique is proposed, and last, some implications on service operations improvement are given. IntroductionWe first introduce our basic concept of service experience of customers starting with the simplified conceptual model of service operations systems (Figure 1) which is modified based on the servuction system model adopted by Bateson (1995).As the model implies, service operations link with customers. Customers as participants act or behave in the service operations system driven by the goal of sufficing their added values. The active participation of customers is one of the unique characteristics of service operations that set a service operations system apart from manufacturing systems. The service operations are divided into two parts ± that which contacts with customers and that which does not. In turn, the customer contact part is broken into two portions ± the inanimate environment and the service personnel. The service value (benefit) perceptions of customers are achieved in the contacts between customers and the contact personnel who are responsible for certain operation tasks and/or the inanimate environments which function for the customers. The totality that customers experience is called the service experience of customers with respect to a service operations system. Customers' service experience relays how service contacts actually occur. Thus, it was proposed that when a customer purchases a service, he or she purchases an experience created in the service operations of a service organization (Bateson, 1995).The growing importance of the service sector in almost every economy in the world has created a significant amount of interest in service operations. In practice, many service sectors have sought and made use of various

Strategic human resource management (SHRM) has an important influence on organizational performance. Previous research has established the positive impact of a specific set SHRM practicesknown as high performance work systems (HPWS)-on firm performance. This study furthers our understanding of the performance impact of HPWS by: (a) proposing organizational coordination as a unique process-based mediator between HPWS and firm performance and (b) examining the impact of national cultural differences on the relationship between HPWS and organizational performance. Data were collected from 98 Chinese and 93 Irish accounting firms. The findings support the mediating role of organizational coordination in the relationship between HPWS and firm performance. Additionally, we found that the effects of organizational coordination were stronger in the high power distance and collectivistic culture of China than in the low power distance and individualistic culture of Ireland. Implications are discussed.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to better understand the indirect link between high-performance work systems (HPWSs) and firm performance in Chinese professional service firms (PSFs) by investigating the mediating role of organizational ambidexterity, i.e. a firm’s capability to simultaneously explore new ideas and exploit existing resources. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from 120 Chinese accounting firms. The authors used hierarchical and polynomial regression analyses to test their hypotheses. Findings – The proposed positive link between the HPWS and organizational ambidexterity was found. Further, the results showed a non-linear relationship between organizational ambidexterity and organizational performance. Research limitations/implications – The present study is limited in terms of small sample size, single industry and self-report data. Practical implications – Firms which reported a higher level of HPWS demonstrated better performance due to their organizational capability to explore new ideas and exploit existing resources. In the Chinese context, firms that had high levels of exploration (exploring new resources) and exploitation (exploiting existing resources) or that had a high level of exploration experienced higher performance. The authors can conclude from these findings that without exploration, organizational success is difficult to achieve for PSFs. Originality/value – This is the first study examining the underlying mechanism of organizational ambidexterity in the indirect relationship between HPWS and firm performance in Chinese PSFs. It advances the authors understanding of HPWS and firm performance relationship in an Eastern country and an emerging context of PSFs. This is also the first study to use polynomial regression to operationalize organizational ambidexterity.

who facilitated the data collection and input in China. Finally, we thank Mr Diarmuid Breathnach at Chartered Accountants Ireland and Mr Yanqi Yu at Liaoning Institute of Certified Public Accountants for their great support in conducting this cross-cultural research project, and the many HR Managers and Managing Partners who completed the surveys.

Abstract-Crowdsourced wireless community networks can effectively alleviate the limited coverage issue of Wi-Fi access points (APs), by encouraging individuals (users) to share their private residential Wi-Fi APs with others. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive economic analysis for such a crowdsourced network, with the particular focus on the users' behavior analysis and the community network operator's pricing design. Specifically, we formulate the interactions between the network operator and users as a two-layer Stackelberg model, where the operator determining the pricing scheme in Layer I, and then users determining their Wi-Fi sharing schemes in Layer II. First, we analyze the user behavior in Layer II via a two-stage membership selection and network access game, for both small-scale networks and large-scale networks. Then, we design a partial price differentiation scheme for the operator in Layer I, which generalizes both the complete price differentiation scheme and the single pricing scheme (i.e., no price differentiation). We show that the proposed partial pricing scheme can achieve a good tradeoff between the revenue and the implementation complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that when using the partial pricing scheme with only two prices, we can increase the operator's revenue up to 124.44% comparing with the single pricing scheme, and can achieve an average of 80% of the maximum operator revenue under the complete price differentiation scheme.

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