A capstone note
Consider the question: can a university function without professors or with disgruntled
professors? Obviously not, and the same is true of drivers in the trucking industry
regardless of the country. Drivers constitute the front line of a trucking company, or
taking a militaristic stance, they are akin to the infantry of an army. Many a time, they
have to play the roles of ambassadors, and their actions or inactions have the potential to
build on, retract from, or even totally destroy the hard earned good name of the company
as well as the accumulated good will with respect to the customers. Ignoring the plight of
the driver or resorting to “band-aid” remedies is an example of marketing myopia.
658
JOSM
26,4
Journal of Service Management 2015.26:648-661.
Empathy with the driver and not apathy toward this front-line community is the
pressing need begging to be satisfied by the trucking powers that be.
Long-haul can be particularly hard on the driver; this should not be lost on
management. It is a fact that dramatic progress in transportation that began in the
twentieth century has revolutionized one of the 4Ps of marketing (“place” referring to
“distribution”). No one in the business world would desire to jeopardize such progress.
In the trucking industry, the “driver” is the principal protagonist and a vital
stakeholder. Therefore, focussing our attention on this entity’s welfare, well-being, and
work/job satisfaction is doubtless the right thing to do. And that would contribute
to an enhancement of the driver’s happiness and possibly that of the industry as well.
After all, achieving happiness to the extent possible is everybody’s goal (Bagozzi and
Nataraajan, 2000; Nataraajan, 2012).
Of course, trucking services are just one of many types of service operations.
This study focusses solely on that type, but employee turnover certainly is a critical
management issue in other settings as well (Chen and Ting, 2014; Kraemer and
Matthias, 2014). For example, Kraemer and Matthias studied personnel turnover for the
“call center” industry. Their study based upon a sample of call center agents found that
emotional exhaustion and organizational pride impact turnover intentions. Further,
turnover intentions are found to be good predictors of turnover behavior.
While organizational pride has received relatively little attention in prior academic
research, it does play a central role in employee turnover. That inculcating
organizational pride in its employees has been a long standing practice in Japanese
industry is well known and it has served as a deterrent to employee turnover in general.
This practice has been spreading beyond Japan albeit in a relatively far slower
manner as compared to that other Japanese practice called KANBAN, the origin of
“Just-in-Time” operations (Nataraajan and Sersland, 1991).
That the foregoing factors along with job satisfaction determinants can impact not
only the “trucking” or “call center” sectors but also pretty much any service sector in
the word is surely not a tenuous or dubious stretch. That we are no longer operating
in a domestic cocoon but a dynamic global economy only adds to the credence of this
well founded belief.