An-Najah Staff

This paper presents a comparative study of two service system designs, i.e., mechanistic and organic, in a public sector call centre environment. It explores the impact of each of these service designs on employees' affective commitment and on service performance. Thirty-nine interviews were conducted in mechanistic call centre and 16 in organic call centre. A nine-item organisational commitment questionnaire was also administered among employees in both places to measure affective commitment levels. The comparison revealed significant improvement in employees' affective commitment level using systems thinking design to create an organic structure when contrasted with employees working under mechanistic structure design. Further, systems thinking has been found of particular benefit to the service performance in terms of departmental communication enhancement and service waste minimisation. The value of this paper is the identification of alternative service design models applied to call centre operations that will leverage employees' affective commitment to improve service performance and enhance customer loyalty.

In recent years manufacturing organizations have recognized that service superiority is a principal strategic device through which to gain competitive advantage. However, there is a shortage of tools available for creating true service superiority and more importantly a shortage of implementation guidelines. This paper sheds light on the lean thinking model applied to manufacturing support services, often operating as call centres, by proposing a novel methodology for its implementation as a value creating model. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted with manufacturing managers, a consultant and lean thinking intervention team members in a manufacturing organization in order to synthesise an implementation methodology. The emerged methodology consists of six steps and decision making criteria that facilitates the implementation of lean thinking in manufacturing service centres. It is concluded that the methodology can be used as an initial strategic tool for senior management intervention in order to provide lean thinking leadership and to develop alternative implementation recommendations.