The effects of customer contact on organizational structure and performance in service firms

Bruce C. Skaggs and Alexandra Galli-Debicella

The Service Industries Journal, 2010, vol. 32, issue 3, 337-352

Abstract: This study examines how customer interactions affects the organizational structure of service organizations, as well as how the alignment between firm structure and customer contact influences organizational performance. Results obtained from 234 service organizations in 96 different industries support our contention that variance in demand generated by the level of customer interaction strongly influences the type of structure a service firm adopts. High degrees of customer contact were significantly related to the use of higher degrees of organizational flexibility. In addition, the results indicate that firms that align organizational flexibility with customer contact achieve superior performance.

Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02642069.2010.529132 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:servic:v:32:y:2010:i:3:p:337-352

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FSIJ20

DOI: 10.1080/02642069.2010.529132

Access Statistics for this article

The Service Industries Journal is currently edited by Eileen Bridges, Professor Domingo Ribeiro, Ronald Goldsmith, Barry Howcroft and Youjae Yi

More articles in The Service Industries Journal from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().