Service Climate, Employee Identification, and Customer Outcomes in Hotel Property Rebranding

Rebrandings have become commonplace on the hotel landscape. Research has not directly examined rebrandings from the employee's perspective, nor has previous research considered the impacts of rebranding on service quality and customer outcomes. In this paper we discuss the role of service climate and employee identification in hospitality organizations and propose a conceptual model that links service climate and employee identification with customer service and related outcomes such as word of mouth communication behaviours. As part of a larger project, 228 employees in three hotels in Australia completed a self report survey. At the time of the survey, the hotels were undergoing rebranding processes. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis investigated the relationships between the variables of interest. Preliminary findings demonstrate the significant role of customer-contact aspects of service climate and the role of employee identification with their department in predicting employee perceptions of customer outcomes. Future research is proposed

Evaluating design effectiveness for public sector services: An introduction to XE

Our research draws on diverse domains: Psychology, service management, human factors, ergonomics, universal design and new public governance to develop a scale for citizen experience measurement. We use the byzantine environment of taxation administration to test and further improve our evaluation model. Our model known as Experience Effectiveness (XE), challenges traditional thinking of service quality as a function of client satisfaction or loyalty. XE uses a multi-participant perspective and is defined in humanist terms of usability, service co-production and the successful completion of the service objective. This paper demonstrates that the strategic use of design in public sector administration can be used to improve citizens' lives. Through evaluating the experiences citizens have interacting with the public sector, governments can prioritise issues, reduce bureaucratic complexity and design better services. Improved public administration will ensure more effective use of revenue and higher levels of compliance with the law through seamless, transparent engagement and higher levels of citizen satisfaction. Initial results from the first of two studies are presented to show the practical application of the XE tool. In the taxation environment, we use the process of starting a small business in Australia as a test case. Both the XE measurement model and the associated citizen-client design are evaluated. The results have significance for all areas that require an objective measure of the impact of design on clients. Experience Effectiveness will also provide objective measures for project governance and performance evaluation. The research demonstrates how successful design outcomes can be a pragmatic alternative to enforcement as the principal approach to deterrence as compliance management

The downsides of downsizing: communication processes and information needs in the aftermath of a workforce reduction strategy.

This study explored the impact of downsizing on levels of uncertainty, coworker and management trust, and communicative effectiveness in a health care organization downsizing during a 2-year period from 660 staff to 350 staff members. Self-report data were obtained from employees who were staying (survivors), from employees were being laid off (victims), and from employees with and without managerial responsibilities. Results indicated that downsizing had a similar impact on the amount of trust that survivors and victims had for management. However, victims reported feeling lower levels of trust toward their colleagues compared with survivors. Contrary to expectations, survivors and victims reported similar perceptions of job and organizational uncertainty and similar levels of information received about changes. Employees with no management responsibilities and middle managers both reported lower scores than did senior managers on all aspects of information received. Implications for practice and the management of the communication process are discussed

Surface Wave Multipath Signals in Near-Field Microwave Imaging

Microwave imaging techniques are prone to signal corruption from unwanted multipath signals. Near-field systems are especially vulnerable because signals can scatter and reflect from structural objects within or on the boundary of the imaging zone. These issues are further exacerbated when surface waves are generated with the potential of propagating along the transmitting and receiving antenna feed lines and other low-loss paths. In this paper, we analyze the contributions of multi-path signals arising from surface wave effects. Specifically, experiments were conducted with a near-field microwave imaging array positioned at variable heights from the floor of a coupling fluid tank. Antenna arrays with different feed line lengths in the fluid were also evaluated. The results show that surface waves corrupt the received signals over the longest transmission distances across the measurement array. However, the surface wave effects can be eliminated provided the feed line lengths are sufficiently long independently of the distance of the transmitting/receiving antenna tips from the imaging tank floor. Theoretical predictions confirm the experimental observations

Injunctive and descriptive logics during newcomer socialization:the impact on organizational identification, trustworthiness, and self-efficacy

Failure to adjust to a new organization has major personal, team, and organizational costs. Yet, we know little about how newcomers' pre-entry institutional assumptions influence and shape their subsequent socialization. To address this issue, we propose and test a model examining whether the discrepancy between newcomers' injunctive logics (pre-entry beliefs about what institutional practices ought to be) and their descriptive logics (actual experience of these institutional practices) influences the development of organizational identification, perceived organizational trustworthiness, and self-efficacy. We examined the impact of discrepant logics in a healthcare context by surveying new staff on their first day of employment and then again six weeks later (N = 264). We found that when there was a negative discrepancy between injunctive and descriptive logics (that is, when the prevailing logics did not match what newcomers thought they ought to be), organizational identification and perceived organizational trustworthiness decreased over time and consequently so did self-efficacy. The results highlight the important role of institutional logics in shaping socialization processes and outcomes soon after organizational entry. We conclude that histories and personal and professional moral codes provide a background against which newcomers evaluate their new institutional, social, and work context. Copyrigh

The Next Generation Of U.S. Farm Policies

Clearly U.S. agriculture has excess capacity. U.S. consumption plus foreign sales were 5-10% less than production in 1981 and 82. Except for massive and expensive supply control, 1983 production would similarly exceed the weak current demand. Stocks of corn and rice at the end of the current marketing year will be about 50% of this year\u27s utilization. For wheat and cotton the carryover into next year will be about 70% of this years\u27 disappearance..

The temporal event-based model: Learning event timelines in progressive diseases

Timelines of events, such as symptom appearance or a change in biomarker value, provide powerful signatures that characterise progressive diseases. Understanding and predicting the timing of events is important for clinical trials targeting individuals early in the disease course when putative treatments are likely to have the strongest effect. However, previous models of disease progression cannot estimate the time between events and provide only an ordering in which they change. Here, we introduce the temporal event-based model (TEBM), a new probabilistic model for inferring timelines of biomarker events from sparse and irregularly sampled datasets. We demonstrate the power of the TEBM in two neurodegenerative conditions: Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Huntington's disease (HD). In both diseases, the TEBM not only recapitulates current understanding of event orderings but also provides unique new ranges of timescales between consecutive events. We reproduce and validate these findings using external datasets in both diseases. We also demonstrate that the TEBM improves over current models; provides unique stratification capabilities; and enriches simulated clinical trials to achieve a power of 80% with less than half the cohort size compared with random selection. The application of the TEBM naturally extends to a wide range of progressive conditions

Microwave Imaging for Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Monitoring: Initial Clinical Experience

Introduction: Microwave tomography recovers images of tissue dielectric properties, which appear to be specific for breast cancer, with low-cost technology that does not present an exposure risk, suggesting the modality may be a good candidate for monitoring neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Methods: Eight patients undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy for locally advanced breast cancer were imaged longitudinally five to eight times during the course of treatment. At the start of therapy, regions of interest (ROIs) were identified from contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging studies. During subsequent microwave examinations, subjects were positioned with their breasts pendant in a coupling fluid and surrounded by an immersed antenna array. Microwave property values were extracted from the ROIs through an automated procedure and statistical analyses were performed to assess short term (30 days) and longer term (four to six months) dielectric property changes. Results: Two patient cases (one complete and one partial response) are presented in detail and demonstrate changes in microwave properties commensurate with the degree of treatment response observed pathologically. Normalized mean conductivity in ROIs from patients with complete pathological responses was significantly different from that of partial responders (P value = 0.004). In addition, the normalized conductivity measure also correlated well with complete pathological response at 30 days (P value = 0.002). Conclusions: These preliminary findings suggest that both early and late conductivity property changes correlate well with overall treatment response to neoadjuvant therapy in locally advanced breast cancer. This result is consistent with earlier clinical outcomes that lesion conductivity is specific to differentiating breast cancer from benign lesions and normal tissue

Standard‐space atlas of the viscoelastic properties of the human brain

Standard anatomical atlases are common in neuroimaging because they facilitate data analyses and comparisons across subjects and studies. The purpose of this study was to develop a standardized human brain atlas based on the physical mechanical properties (i.e., tissue viscoelasticity) of brain tissue using magnetic resonance elastography (MRE). MRE is a phase contrast-based MRI method that quantifies tissue viscoelasticity noninvasively and in vivo thus providing a macroscopic representation of the microstructural constituents of soft biological tissue. The development of standardized brain MRE atlases are therefore beneficial for comparing neural tissue integrity across populations. Data from a large number of healthy, young adults from multiple studies collected using common MRE acquisition and analysis protocols were assembled (N = 134; 78F/ 56 M; 18–35 years). Nonlinear image registration methods were applied to normalize viscoelastic property maps (shear stiffness, μ, and damping ratio, ξ) to the MNI152 standard structural template within the spatial coordinates of the ICBM-152. We find that average MRE brain templates contain emerging and symmetrized anatomical detail. Leveraging the substantial amount of data assembled, we illustrate that subcortical gray matter structures, white matter tracts, and regions of the cerebral cortex exhibit differing mechanical characteristics. Moreover, we report sex differences in viscoelasticity for specific neuroanatomical structures, which has implications for understanding patterns of individual differences in health and disease. These atlases provide reference values for clinical investigations as well as novel biophysical signatures of neuroanatomy. The templates are made openly available (github.com/mechneurolab/mre134) to foster collaboration across research institutions and to support robust cross-center comparisons