Computational Modeling of the Value Co-Creation Process in Customer Service: An Application of the NK Model.

There has been an increasing interest to explore and gain knowledge about customer engagement behavior among academia and practitioners. Particularly, the value co-creation process in customer services is essential to explore the interaction structure. In this study, we applied the computational simulation of the NK model to identify the value co-creation process between service employees and customers in the service context. To specifically explore the dynamic interaction among them, we identified what kind of service is provided for what type of customers and when service performance improves according to the degree of interaction between service employees and customers. The simulations show that the greatest service value can be achieved when employees and customers jointly perform local search (90%) and long jump (10%). However, if both employees and customers jointly perform local search only, the service value can be stuck in a local optimum. In cases where employees and customers make their independent improvement, either through local search or long jump, the overall service value varies depending on the complexity of interactions between employees and customers. For example, the improvement in service value is the worst when employees and customers make long jumps at independent timings in high complex interactions. Our computational simulations offer visible experimental-based insights into understanding the value co-creation process with customers and promising results for customer service studies.

Identity Leadership, Employee Burnout and the Mediating Role of Team Identification: Evidence from the Global Identity Leadership Development Project.

Do leaders who build a sense of shared social identity in their teams thereby protect them from the adverse effects of workplace stress? This is a question that the present paper explores by testing the hypothesis that identity leadership contributes to stronger team identification among employees and, through this, is associated with reduced burnout. We tested this model with unique datasets from the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project with participants from all inhabited continents. We compared two datasets from 2016/2017 (n = 5290; 20 countries) and 2020/2021 (n = 7294; 28 countries) and found very similar levels of identity leadership, team identification and burnout across the five years. An inspection of the 2020/2021 data at the onset of and later in the COVID-19 pandemic showed stable identity leadership levels and slightly higher levels of both burnout and team identification. Supporting our hypotheses, we found almost identical indirect effects (2016/2017, b = -0.132; 2020/2021, b = -0.133) across the five-year span in both datasets. Using a subset of n = 111 German participants surveyed over two waves, we found the indirect effect confirmed over time with identity leadership (at T1) predicting team identification and, in turn, burnout, three months later. Finally, we explored whether there could be a "too-much-of-a-good-thing" effect for identity leadership. Speaking against this, we found a u-shaped quadratic effect whereby ratings of identity leadership at the upper end of the distribution were related to even stronger team identification and a stronger indirect effect on reduced burnout.

Coherent addition of fiber lasers by use of a fiber coupler.

Coherent addition of fiber lasers coupled with an intracavity fiber coupler is reported. Almost a single output is obtained from one of the fiber ports, which one can switch simply by unbalancing the losses in the ports. We show that the constructive supermodes, each of which has a single output in a different port, build up automatically because of the dense longitudinal-mode, length-unbalanced laser array with unbalanced port loss. High addition efficiencies of 93.6% for two fiber lasers and 95.6% for four fiber lasers have been obtained.