5,891 research outputs found
HRM in Service: The Contingencies Abound
[Excerpt] Despite the rapid growth in the diversity of service consumersâboth abroad and domesticallyâtheoretical developments regarding this diversity in the service world have lagged far behind those that have characterized the world of manufacturing. With regard to international services, Knight (1999) conducted a review of the literature and concluded that there is an alarming paucity of research on international services management despite the importance of services in the global economy. A large proportion of the research that has been conducted on international services has focused on marketing issues rather than human resource management (HRM) issues. This means that little is known about the cross-cultural applicability of service HRM theories, which have hitherto been developed and tested almost exclusively within the West (mostly within the U.S. context). Similarly, there has been little research on the HRM implications of the growing diversity of service consumers within the U.S. domestic market. Again, much of the research focuses on the challenges associated with simultaneously marketing services to a multicultural customer base, with little or no work focusing on the implications of these challenges for HRM in service firms. Thus, the purpose of our chapter is to introduce a preliminary discussion of the HRM implications of both increased internationalization and domestic diversity for service firms. We begin by presenting a brief synthesis of the services management literature that has been established to date. Readers will note in the synthesis that a number of contingencies with regard to HRM practices have already been introduced especially via definitions of what constitutes service and the role of customers in service production and delivery. We then discuss the potential cross-cultural applicability of these services management principles abroad, and when doing so, we focus primarily on the aspects of services management theories that are laden with Western cultural principles. Next, we discuss parallel challenges faced by service firms as a result of increased diversity within the domestic marketplace and we conclude with some thoughts about the necessity to more explicitly explore the contingent nature of HRM practices
How well do third-order aperture mass statistics separate E- and B-modes?
With 3rd-order statistics of gravitational shear it will be possible to
extract valuable cosmological information from ongoing and future weak lensing
surveys which is not contained in standard 2nd-order statistics, due to the
non-Gaussianity of the shear field. Aperture mass statistics are an appropriate
choice for 3rd-order statistics due to their simple form and their ability to
separate E- and B-modes of the shear. However, it has been demonstrated that
2nd-order aperture mass statistics suffer from E-/B-mode mixing because it is
impossible to reliably estimate the shapes of close pairs of galaxies. This
finding has triggered developments of several new 2nd-order statistical
measures for cosmic shear. Whether the same developments are needed for
3rd-order shear statistics is largely determined by how severe this E-/B-mixing
is for 3rd-order statistics. We test 3rd-order aperture mass statistics against
E-/B-mode mixing, and find that the level of contamination is well-described by
a function of , with being the
cut-off scale. At angular scales of , the
decrease in the E-mode signal due to E-/B-mode mixing is smaller than 1
percent, and the leakage into B-modes is even less. For typical small-scale
cut-offs this E-/B-mixing is negligible on scales larger than a few arcminutes.
Therefore, 3rd-order aperture mass statistics can safely be used to separate E-
and B-modes and infer cosmological information, for ground-based surveys as
well as forthcoming space-based surveys such as Euclid.Comment: references added, A&A publishe
ILR Impact Brief - Employee Attributions about HR Practices Lead to Customer Satisfaction
[Excerpt] The perceived reasons why management chooses a set of HR practices are linked to employee satisfaction, commitment, and on-the-job behavior. Employees individually make their own attributions about the purposes behind the practices, which are, in turn, associated with employeesâ attitudes: a perception that management cares about service (or product) quality and employee well-being is associated with positive attitudes, but a sense that management is intent on cost cutting or employee exploitation is associated with negative attitudes. Furthermore, individual attitudes are shared within work units and in their aggregate are associated with âorganizational citizenship behaviors;â i.e., group-level satisfaction and commitment are associated with intra-unit helping behaviors, which are linked to enhanced unit performance and customer satisfaction
Extreme Lagrangian acceleration in confined turbulent flow
A Lagrangian study of two-dimensional turbulence for two different
geometries, a periodic and a confined circular geometry, is presented to
investigate the influence of solid boundaries on the Lagrangian dynamics. It is
found that the Lagrangian acceleration is even more intermittent in the
confined domain than in the periodic domain. The flatness of the Lagrangian
acceleration as a function of the radius shows that the influence of the wall
on the Lagrangian dynamics becomes negligible in the center of the domain and
it also reveals that the wall is responsible for the increased intermittency.
The transition in the Lagrangian statistics between this region, not directly
influenced by the walls, and a critical radius which defines a Lagrangian
boundary layer, is shown to be very sharp with a sudden increase of the
acceleration flatness from about 5 to about 20
Conditional vorticity budget of coherent and incoherent flow contributions in fully developed homogeneous isotropic turbulence
We investigate the conditional vorticity budget of fully developed
three-dimensional homogeneous isotropic turbulence with respect to coherent and
incoherent flow contributions. The Coherent Vorticity Extraction based on
orthogonal wavelets allows to decompose the vorticity field into coherent and
incoherent contributions, of which the latter are noise-like. The impact of the
vortex structures observed in fully developed turbulence on statistical balance
equations is quantified considering the conditional vorticity budget. The
connection between the basic structures present in the flow and their
statistical implications is thereby assessed. The results are compared to those
obtained for large- and small-scale contributions using a Fourier
decomposition, which reveals pronounced differences
Cosmic Shear Tomography and Efficient Data Compression using COSEBIs
Context. Gravitational lensing is one of the leading tools in understanding
the dark side of the Universe. The need for accurate, efficient and effective
methods which are able to extract this information along with other
cosmological parameters from cosmic shear data is ever growing. COSEBIs,
Complete Orthogonal Sets of E-/B-Integrals, is a recently developed statistical
measure that encompasses the complete E-/B-mode separable information contained
in the shear correlation functions measured on a finite angular range. Aims.
The aim of the present work is to test the properties of this newly developed
statistics for a higher-dimensional parameter space and to generalize and test
it for shear tomography. Methods. We use Fisher analysis to study the
effectiveness of COSEBIs. We show our results in terms of figure-of-merit
quantities, based on Fisher matrices. Results. We find that a relatively small
number of COSEBIs modes is always enough to saturate to the maximum information
level. This number is always smaller for 'logarithmic COSEBIs' than for 'linear
COSEBIs', and also depends on the number of redshift bins, the number and
choice of cosmological parameters, as well as the survey characteristics.
Conclusions. COSEBIs provide a very compact way of analyzing cosmic shear data,
i.e., all the E-/B-mode separable second-order statistical information in the
data is reduced to a small number of COSEBIs modes. Furthermore, with this
method the arbitrariness in data binning is no longer an issue since the
COSEBIs modes are discrete. Finally, the small number of modes also implies
that covariances, and their inverse, are much more conveniently obtainable,
e.g., from numerical simulations, than for the shear correlation functions
themselves.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figure
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