Essays on Service Productivity

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Despite the immense growth of services and the continuing 'Service Revolution', service productivity has not gained very much attention until recently. The research field has neglected both the theoretical-conceptual and the empirical perspective. That is where this dissertation, consisting of three quasi-independent articles, commences. Article I describes the highly complex domain of service productivity touching various fields in service marketing and beyond, including economics, strategy research, and human resources. The article presents core theoretical perspectives, develops an integrative framework, and discusses the framework's stages and relationships in light of the status quo of the empirical literature. Most importantly, the author's perspective that is presented here is that productivity in services is more than just internal efficiency such as labor productivity. The following two articles further substantiate this conclusion also empirically. The findings in Article II illustrate that firms can also be productive without being highly 'internal efficient'. This is unique to services, as productivity works differently than in traditional tangible 'goods manufacturing', as illustrated in the conceptual article. Quite interestingly, some firms can in fact achieve a 'dual orientation', that is, when they successfully combine internal and external efficiency. Article III further demonstrates that a relative reduction in internal efficiency in a recession can help to make firms in human-dominant (e.g., entertainment, hotels) and essential service industries (e.g., insurance, health-care) grow customer satisfaction more effectively than in normal times. This not only helps to make firms more robust during recessions, but such a counter-cyclical strategy also lays the foundation for future profitability. Thus, the 'trade-off theorem' between internal and external efficiency can actually be applied to leap ahead. The dissertation makes important contributions to research, as well as management practice. The three articles fill distinct research gaps in the literature. For managers valuable implications are derived.