Service staff attitudes, organisational practices and performance drivers

We provide conceptual and empirical insights elucidating how organizational practices influence service staff attitudes and behaviors and how the latter set affects organizational performance drivers. Our analyses suggest that service organizations can enhance their performance by putting in place strategies and practices that strengthen the service-oriented behaviors of their employees and reduce their intentions to leave the organization. Improved performance is accomplished through both the delivery of high quality services (enhancing organizational effectiveness) and the maintenance of frontline staff(increasing organizational efficiency). Specifically, service-oriented business strategies in the form of organizational-level service orientation and practices in the form of training directly influence the manifest service-oriented behaviors of staff. Training also indirectly affects the intention of frontline staff to leave the organization; it increases job satisfaction, which, in turn has an impact on affective commitment. Both affective and instrumental commitment were hypothesized to reduce the intentions of frontline staff to leave the organization, however only affective commitment had a significant effect.

The efficacy of the Sortino ratio and other benchmarked performance measures under skewed return distributions

This paper will investigate the suitability of existing performance measures under the assumption of a clearly defined benchmark. A range of measures are examined including the Sortino Ratio, the Sharpe Selection ratio (SSR), the Student’s t-test and a decay rate measure. A simulation study is used to assess the power and bias of these measures based on variations in sample size and mean performance of two simulated funds. The Sortino Ratio is found to be the superior performance measure exhibiting more power and less bias than the SSR when the distribution of excess returns are skewed.

Impromptu : an interactive programming environment for composition and performance

Interactive development environments are making a resurgence. The traditional batch style of programming, edit -> compile -> run, is slowly being reevaluated by the development community at large. Languages such as Perl, Python and Ruby are at the heart of a new programming culture commonly described as extreme, agile or dynamic. Musicians are also beginning to embrace these environments and to investigate the opportunity to use dynamic programming tools in live performance. This paper provides an introduction to Impromptu, a new interactive development environment for musicians and sound artists.