Application of the european customer satisfaction index to postal services. Structural equation models versus partial least squars

Customer satisfaction and retention are key issues for organizations in today’s competitive market place. As such, much research and revenue has been invested in developing accurate ways of assessing consumer satisfaction at both the macro (national) and micro (organizational) level, facilitating comparisons in performance both within and between industries. Since the instigation of the national customer satisfaction indices (CSI), partial least squares (PLS) has been used to estimate the CSI models in preference to structural equation models (SEM) because they do not rely on strict assumptions about the data. However, this choice was based upon some misconceptions about the use of SEM’s and does not take into consideration more recent advances in SEM, including estimation methods that are robust to non-normality and missing data. In this paper, both SEM and PLS approaches were compared by evaluating perceptions of the Isle of Man Post Office Products and Customer service using a CSI format. The new robust SEM procedures were found to be advantageous over PLS. Product quality was found to be the only driver of customer satisfaction, while image and satisfaction were the only predictors of loyalty, thus arguing for the specificity of postal services

El impacto sobre los trabajadores de una gestión de recursos humanos socialmente responsable. Un análisis para Catalunya

Socially responsible human resource management constitutes the conceptual-theory framework of the thesis. The results obtained from the empirical part show the existence of three clusters inasmuch as the application of socially responsible practices for promoting job quality in the case of Catalonia: the group of workers in “organizations with low-level of social responsibility”; those who work in a environment of “work practices for implication” and the group of workers in a environment oriented to “health and safety at work”. Among the determining factors in applying these practices we can find characteristics of the firms where the employees work as well as personal characteristics and those of the job. The research also shows that, in general, applying socially responsible management in human resources does have positive effects on the worker and therefore creates greater trust in management, increased job satisfaction, less stress at work and a lower intention to quit a job.