Managing the global service transition: employees’ reactions and management responses

Abstract

Despite the importance of global engineering services (GES) to many manufacturing companies, this area of research has not been studied extensively. This paper explores the role of employees in a manufacturer’s transition to a global engineering services provider. Based on the literature, a conceptual framework is defined, which specifies the dynamic interaction between employee reactions and management responses to determine the transition outcome. Evidence is presented from a single case study based on 21 interviews and observations as well as documents and media information. The findings empirically demonstrate how employee resistance, support and rejection of the globalisation strategy develop, resulting in the need for continuous management responses to ensure global integration. Exemplar employee reactions are prioritisation of local over global customers in service delivery due to lack of ownership, which were responded to by designing new organisational procedures to ensure local prioritisation of global customers with service contracts. This study contributes to the emerging field of global operations management by studying the operational contributions of employees and the respective management responses. This research focuses specifically on global services as a novel focal area within this emerging field.

Keywords:

• Organisational transition
• global manufacturing
• global engineering services
• servitization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Madalina Pana

Madalina Pana is a PhD student at the Department of Management, Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Her PhD project focuses on the organisational transition in the process of integrating products and engineering services into the offerings of the manufacturing companies. During her studies in Organisational and Industrial Psychology, she involved in research projects concerning topics as the organisational behaviour, organisational culture and organisational commitment.

Melanie E. Kreye

Dr. Melanie E. Kreye is an Associate Professor at the Department of Management, Technology and Economics, Technical University of Denmark (DT U). Her research area is Operations Management and she focuses on topics related to service operations within manufacturing industry including services offerings development, management of changes and the management of uncertainty. She is an Associate Editor with the International Journal of Operations and Production Management and Board member of EurOMA.