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The Global Business Services Model is often suggested for organizing the shared service centers of a company. An explorative study on the GBS model in practice is conducted in four companies. It shows many benefits, but also challenges, for which, however, companies have found solutions. While the overall assessment of the GBS model is positive, there are circumstances under which it is recommended.

Today, customer satisfaction alone is not enough anymore in the tourism and hospitality industry in order to win the loyalty of guests. Instead, the industry need to achieve service excellence by delighting their guests with a set of drivers of excellence. Despite the relevance of the topic to the Asian tourism industry, the extant literature is scarce and fragmented. The 12 chapters in this book derive from a call for papers as well as from a study tour of Singapore and Malaysia. Papers went through a double-blind peer review procedure. They comprise both conceptual and—in most cases—empirical papers, drawing on recent research in the Asian tourism and hospitality industry. This edited book sets out to examine what and how companies in the tourism and hospitality industry do to deliver a high level of service excellence. They span aspects including the design of services, managing customer-oriented operations, leveraging digital technology and managing resources.

Whilst the Asian region is experiencing a growth in tourist arrivals, it becomes increasingly important for businesses in its tourism and hospitality industry to find ways to sustain the growth momentum into the future. This edited book posits that going beyond just customer satisfaction to achieve customer delight may be the solution. For long-term competitiveness, with a better understanding of customer needs, businesses can develop their operational capabilities and competencies in meeting these needs, not only to satisfy, but also to delight their customers. Some key takeaways from the broad array of practices and challenges discussed in the 12 chapters in this book include the influence of cultures on how and what businesses in the Asian tourism and hospitality industry do in their quest for service excellence, as well as how adding a personal touch can make a key difference on the whole customer experience.

The management process for achieving customer delight is crucial for long-term success within the tourism and hospitality industry. In order to achieve customer delight, enterprises require a process for measuring it. This chapter gives an overview of the control circuit of service quality. Drawing on a standard for service excellence developed in Germany, it first outlines theoretical concepts of measuring customer delight for achieving service excellence, and introduces them into the English-language literature on tourism and hospitality. Based on an empirical study, it reports on how measurement is conducted in practice in select businesses in the tourism and hospitality industry in Singapore and Malaysia. Empirical findings show that a business must first determine the standard it aims to attain before designing a measurement. Results from a customer survey need to be reviewed from a business’s perspective. For small-scale businesses, a less sophisticated version of delight measurement may be more appropriate. Examples of how the measurement process itself can be delightful for customers are shown, and recommendations for practice are made.

Most cross-border organizational practice transfer involves implementation challenges, yet key literature in this field largely overlooks the mediating role of the transfer coalition, which serves as a ‘bridge’ between headquarters and subsidiaries in transferring an organizational practice. By exploring an in-depth case study of a top-tier professional service firm, this study contributes to the literature on cross-border human resource management practice transfer. We show that the transfer coalition displayed activities that translated into two separate managerial roles – transfer leadership and control – that were practiced with quite different levels of commitment by different members and impacted the successful management of the transfer process. We propose two distinctive transfer coalition archetypes – the entrepreneurial and the ceremonial type – where the leadership and control roles were practiced quite differently and reached different levels of organizational practice adoption. Furthermore, we suggest practical implications for HR professionals in order to improve global leadership and control competence.

In project teams that are distributed across the international subsidiaries of a firm, collaboration can be a challenge. The organizational context of projects is not always conducive to international collaboration. Priorities and interests of sub-teams are likely to differ from those of the central team. In a grounded theory study of international client projects in a project-based organization, the impact of organizational context on collaboration is explored. It was found that the organizational context can provide important resources such as authority, policies, procedures and systems that can be appropriated to enable collaboration. However, this applies only when there are drivers for collaboration, consisting of interdependency and interest in the project's success. Even in a context not conducive to collaboration, the drivers encourage teams to constitute informal mechanisms, enabling some level of collaboration. A framework for the impact of organizational context on collaboration in international projects is presented.

This study examines the transfer of management practices from a regional headquarters to the local subsidiaries in a transnational professional service firm. Using an in-depth case study of a top-tier transnational professional service firm, we develop an empirically grounded theory. We analyse how partners of local subsidiaries responded to a global integration initiative and identify contingencies that influenced partners' responses to pressures of conformity from the regional headquarters. We found a broad diversity of responses ranging from complying to open resistance when adopting the management practice locally. This diversity of responses is explained by three major categories emerging from our data - local fit, linking practices, and subsidiary resources. By focusing our attention on individual actors and their responses in the light of a multiplicity of institutional interests, norms, and beliefs, this article seeks to expand the global-local debate in multinational corporations.