infonet-economy

The research topics HRM and customer involvement are usually investigated separately. On the one hand, research shows that the spectrum of roles and functions of customers as key company stakeholders has changed dramatically in the last few years. In service companies, now more than ever, customers becoming active players, which can exert significant influence especially on customer contact employees. On the other hand, HRM research concentrates so far primarily on the relationships and configurations within organizations that lead to optimal human resource architecture, and not beyond organizational boundaries. The analysis of the interrelatedness of this two research topics shows that customers can actually significantly influence the success of a company's HRM. If the objective of the HRM function is to adapt and add value to the organization, it has to rethink its concepts to include new factors relevant to the organization. Corresponding implications and future directions for practice and research are outlined.

The objective of this dissertation is to investigate how customer orientation can be achieved in service industries by focussing on customer value (CV) and how changing customer roles are interrelated with leadership and HRM.

Paper I focuses on customer value theory. In that CV research is a very broad research topic with remarkably little consensus, the objective of this paper is to provide a sound understanding of the research topic CV. Therefore, the research streams perceived customer value (PCV) and desired customer value (DCV) are analysed, including a critical evaluation of both conceptual and empirical work. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the relationships between the CV construct and other central marketing concepts. The results show that CV research makes a valuable contribution toward a better understanding of the needs, decisions, and behaviour of customers.

Paper II provides a managerial tool to identify what is creating value and to analyse the gaps between customer and employee value perceptions in order to improve a company's value proposition and delivery. An analytical model with a four-step approach is presented and implemented in the field of financial services. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with customers of a financial services broker, five value dimensions are identified. The results are compared to value assumptions made by advisors in 24 in-depth interviews. Subsequently, implications for CV management of the identified value drivers and dimensions as well as gaps are derived. Results support the appropriateness of the approach for identifying novel value drivers, interdependencies between value elements, and giving clear indications of how a company can improve CV.

Papers III and IV are based on the analysis of changing customer roles within the service process. The analysis shows that customers are becoming more active and taking on multiple and sophisticated roles as sources of competence, innovators or even as advocates. Based on these results, the interrelatedness and implications of customer roles on leadership (in Paper III) and HRM (in Paper IV) are investigated. Research in leadership and HRM concentrates thus far on configurations within organisations, without taking into account customers. Paper III shows that customers can not only exert influence on employees directly and indirectly, but also on leadership. Customers can take on leadership functions in the areas of behaviour selection, stabilisation and modification. Paper IV shows that customers can strengthen, complement, or thwart the workings of the organisation and functional components such as those of HRM. Furthermore, the paper presents how HRM can contribute to increasing the customer orientation of employees and companies by reducing role conflicts and role ambiguity and by creating added value for customers with various examples.

Purpose - The objective of this paper is to provide research-ers and practitioners with an understanding of the implica-tions and consequences of changes in customer roles and involvement on HRM within a service context.
Design/Approach - This paper is conceptual and the ap-proach adopted is analytical. Extant research and concepts have been used to analyse customer roles and customer involvement and their effects on employees. Based on these insights, managerial and research implications are dis-cussed.
Findings - The insights from this study provide conceptual support for including customers as a relevant reference and/or extension of human resource management (HRM) beyond the organisational boundaries. Customers can actu-ally significantly influence the success of a company's HRM.
Research limitations/implications - Analysis of the interre-latedness of customer involvement and HRM is limited to services than encompass emotional and communicative aspects. It is argued that an extension of HRM concepts by considering customers' influence provides great potential for future research opportunities.
Practical implications - The paper discusses the contribu-tion of central HRM functions in increasing the customer orientation of employees and companies, reducing role con-flicts and role ambiguity, and creating added value for cus-tomers. The aspects described here have the potential to contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of HRM and to increase the added value of the HRM function to the organisation.
Originality/value - To date, HRM and customer roles gen-erally have been investigated separately. The analysis of the interrelatedness of these two worlds is likely to trigger and encourage innovative research designs and alternative methodological approaches to new research problems, lead-ing to the added potential of novel research findings with important implications for practice.

In this paper we present a family of iterative methods to solve numerically second order elliptic problems with multi-scale data using multiple levels of grids. These methods are based upon the introduction of a Lagrange multiplier to enforce the continuity of the solution and its fluxes across interfaces. This family of methods can be interpreted as a mortar element method with complete overlapping domain decomposition for solving numerically multi-scale elliptic problems.

In this paper we present a method for the numerical solution of elliptic problems with multi-scale data using multiple levels of not necessarily nested grids. The method consists in calculating successive corrections to the solution in patches whose discretizations are not necessarily conforming. This paper provides proofs of the results published earlier (see C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 337 (2003) 679-684), gives a generalization of the latter to more than two domains and contains extensive numerical illustrations. New results including the spectral analysis of the iteration operator and a numerical method to evaluate the constant of the strengthened Cauchy-Buniakowski-Schwarz inequality are presented.

Substandard annuities pay higher pensions to individuals with impaired health and thus require special underwriting of applicants. Although such risk classification can substantially increase a company's profitability, these products are uncommon except for the well-established U.K. market. In this paper we comprehensively analyze this issue and make several contributions to the literature. First, we describe enhanced, impaired life, and care annuities, and then we discuss the underwriting process and underwriting risk related thereto. Second, we propose a theoretical model to determine the optimal profit-maximizing risk classification system for substandard annuities. Based on the model framework and for given price-demand dependencies, we formally show the effect of classification costs and costs of underwriting risk on profitability for insurers. Risk classes are distinguished by the average mortality of contained insureds, whereby mortality heterogeneity is included by means of a frailty model. Third, we discuss key aspects regarding a practical implementation of our model as well as possible market entry barriers for substandard annuity providers.

In financial conglomerates and insurance groups, enterprise risk management is becoming increasingly important in controlling and managing the different independent legal entities in the group. The aim of this paper is to assess and relate risk concentration and joint default probabilities of the group's legal entities in order to achieve a more comprehensive picture of an insurance group's risk situation. We further examine the impact of the type of dependence structure on results by comparing linear and nonlinear dependencies using different copula concepts under certain distributional assumptions. Our results show that even if financial groups with different dependence structures do have the same risk concentration factor, joint default probabilities of different sets of subsidiaries can vary tremendously.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of capital and risk transfer instruments (CRTIs) on a financial group's risk situation. In this respect, we extend previous literature by accounting for the conglomerate discount on firm value, which is a reduction in shareholder value due to diversification within the group. In general, CRTIs between parent and subsidiaries have a substantial effect on the diversification of risks, economic capital requirements, and default risk, which we study in detail for different types of CRTIs, including intra-group retrocession and guarantees. One main finding is that diversification effects within the group are much lower when taking into account conglomerate discount effects. We believe this aspect to be an important issue in the ongoing discussion on group solvency regulation and enterprise risk management.