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.