Volume 20, Number 1 Article by Krishanu Rakshit March, 2008
Service Leadership : By Svafa Grönfeldt and Judith Strother, 2006, Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, pp 318, Price: $49.95. :
The primary objective of the book, as set out by the authors, is to develop a culture of service leadership in organisations, so that the organisation can ‘engage its people in a proactive quest for competitive advantage’. The target audience can therefore be assumed to be the corporate reader. The authors further comment that ‘increased competition has called attention to the growing importance of employee initiatives, innovation, flexibility, and productivity as a response to pressures to adapt to external changes’ – and this perhaps is where the first signs of concern creep into the readers’ minds. This is a lot of ground to cover, on the swampy terrains of services management; everyone knows that in spite of the number of studies that have been carried out in this area, gaping holes remain when it comes to developing an all-encompassing framework for services. Therefore, developing a comprehensive framework of service leadership and sustainable competitive advantage seems ambitious indeed.
One of the significant aspects of this book is the departure from the traditional 4P or 6P or 7P framework, to a more manageable 3P framework. The 3 Ps in question are Promise, People and Process, of which ‘promise’ is the only new component in this framework. According to the authors, ‘strategies are crucial for developing the service promise, which has to be tied to the organisation’s goals and mission’. Therefore, promise is all about strategic management, and the other elements of process (service management) and people (human resource management) come together to create a service leadership strategy. This would seem quite confusing for practitioners, since the strategic role is not well understood. Besides, most academics would agree that strategic management cannot be segregated from human resource management, whereas service management is carried out much more at the tactical levels.
While the authors provide a detailed discussion of the challenges of services and the dichotomy between standardisation and personalisation, they fail to offer any strategies to manage this apparent contradiction. In some cases, the authors have taken up too many unrelated issues in a single section. The section ‘Managerial Implications in Service Organisations’ is a case in point — the authors deal with loyalty of customers, operational efficiency (the apparent dichotomy between standardisation and personalisation), image issues of the service industry, ‘anti-halo’ effect, role ambiguity and poor pay in service industries, all within a span of two pages. This is followed by a map of customer satisfaction and loyalty (retention), which is largely misplaced in this casual discussion context. This trend continues in most chapters across this book, where strategic issues have been juxtaposed with tactical and operational issues, which would frustrate practising managers. While the breadth of coverage is to be appreciated, it would undoubtedly confuse the practitioner, rather than enhancing his or her understanding of service leadership.
In Chapter 4, which deals with the formulation of strategic promises, the authors suggest that service organisations need unique strategies. However, the case is not adequately made for such unique strategies. In service management literature, it is widely understood that the challenges of the service industry stem from intangibility, perishability, limitations of standardisation, leading to variability or heterogeneity, and simultaneous production and consumption. The authors’ justification of ‘uniqueness’ of the service industry because of its dynamism is not quite accurate, as such challenges are witnessed in several high technology product contexts too.
The book boasts an impressive range of references and it is a fair indication of the extent of research that the authors have undertaken to deliver this academic work. The case studies which accompany each chapter are interesting to read, but owing to the fact that most of these case studies are fairly generic, rather than highlighting a particular dimension of service delivery leadership, their exact linkage with the adjoining chapter is not too clear. Some of the diagrams used extensively in this book also seem to be misplaced as far as context is concerned. Even at the end of the book, where the authors would be expected more to deliver on their own promise of service leadership, they have delved rather unnecessarily into tactical matters. These and other operational details could have been discussed earlier in the book, leaving the final chapters for a discussion of strategic roles and issues. The book gives a feel that seemingly unrelated, albeit interesting, paragraphs were added to create a big jigsaw puzzle. Overall, the book promised a lot, but delivered very little.
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