The Customer Contact Model for Organization Design

Richard B. Chase and David A. Tansik
Additional contact information
Richard B. Chase: University of Arizona
David A. Tansik: University of Arizona

Management Science, 1983, vol. 29, issue 9, 1037-1050

Abstract: The literature on organization design has been dominated by descriptive models in its dealing with structure and operations. This paper takes an alternative view advocating the use of a normative model to be used in the design of service organizations. This model sees the extent of customer contact with the service organization as a major variable affecting system performance and advocates reconfiguring the structure of the service organization to reflect this impact. The discussion describes a taxonomy used to classify firms along the contact dimension and develops 13 propositions which convey critical distinctions between high and low contact services. Application of the model for managerial decision making involves the use of decoupling and the paper identifies factors which favor/disfavor decoupling in light of existing and desired service delivery objectives.

Keywords: organizational design; decoupling; customer contact; service systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1983
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.29.9.1037 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ormnsc:v:29:y:1983:i:9:p:1037-1050

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().