Customer Service Delivery: Research and Best Practices, published by Jossey-Bass (2006), taps into business, marketing, and psychological research and practices to provide a wealth of knowledge about customer service.
Chapter 2, Organizing for Customer Service, authored by Robert Vance, provides an overview of organizations as they respond to and are ultimately controlled by their customers. Dr. Vance considers the rapidly changing impact of information technology on the management of customer service work and workers.
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Employee Engagement and Commitment: A Guide to Understanding, Measuring and Increasing Engagement in Your Organization, authored by Robert Vance, is the 2006 volume of the Society for Human Resource Management Foundation’s Effective Practice Guidelines.
Dr. Vance provides an overview of employee engagement as defined and measured by employers today. By grounding engagement in the psychology of work roles and commitment, he advises employers in aligning their management practices to foster an engaged and committed workforce that achieves superior business results.
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The Changing Nature of Work: Implications for Occupational Analysis, published in 1999 by the National Academy Press of the National Academy of Sciences, is a report of the Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance: Occupational Analysis.
Robert Vance served as a committee member and co-author. The report examines the evidence for change in the world of work and provides a framework for analyzing the structure of work and occupations, both civilian and military.
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Employees, Careers, and Job Creation: Developing Growth-oriented Human Resource Strategies and Programs, published by Jossey-Bass (1995), illustrates novel approaches to finding successful alternatives to employee displacement and corporate downsizing by linking employee development and job creation with organizational growth.
Robert Vance co-authored Chapter 12, Developing Computerized Outplacement Counseling Programs: The Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and Base. STEP-UP, a decision-support system for transforming dislocated defense workers, is described.
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STEP-UP: A Decision-support System for Transforming the Dislocated US Defense Workforce, was co-authored by Robert Vance and published in the journal Interfaces [Vitolo, T. M., & Vance, R. J. (2002). Interfaces, 32, 75-83.]
Development of STEP-UP, a career counseling decision-support system, is described with particular emphasis on creation of work descriptors that enable matching job seekers to employment opportunities. Benefits of database and online systems to users and administrators are explored.
Collective Enactment of Leadership Roles and Team Effectiveness: A Field Study, was co-authored by Robert Vance and published in the journal The Leadership Quarterly [Hiller, N.J., Day, D. V., & Vance, R. J. (2006). The Leadership Quarterly, 17,387-397.]
Collective team leadership within highway department road maintenance teams, particularly on the dimension of development and mentoring, was shown to positively relate to team performance.
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Stress & Well-Being at Work: Assessments and Interventions for Occupational Mental Health, published by the American Psychological Association (1992), is a synthesis of empirical research efforts, idiographic inquiries, and conceptual reviews that sets out a new prevention framework to abate the risks of work-related psychological disorders.
Chapter 4, Job Insecurity and Moderators of the Relation between Job Insecurity and Employee Adjustment, co-authored by Robert Vance, examines effects of job and employment insecurity on psychological adjustment of blue- and white-collar employees.
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Encyclopedia of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, published by Sage Publications (2006), summarizes current research and useful facts for more than 400 topics encompassed by the cross-disciplinary field of industrial and organizational psychology, including areas of psychology, business, management, and human resources.
Organizational Cynicism, authored by Robert Vance, examines employees’ negative attitudes and reactions toward workplace change. To succeed, change initiatives in companies (such as continuous quality improvement, process reengineering, and customer focus) require acceptance and support of employees. Research on organizational cynicism, the contrarian belief and expectation that improvement efforts are doomed to failure, is summarized.
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