The nurse scheduling problem (NSP) has been a crucial and challenging research issue for hospitals, especially considering the serious deterioration in nursing shortages in recent years owing to long working hours, considerable work pressure, and irregular lifestyle, which are important in the service industry. This study investigates the NSP that aims to maximize nurse satisfaction with the generated schedule subject to government laws, internal regulations of hospitals, doctor-nurse pairing rules, shift and day off preferences of nurses, etc. The computational experiment results show that our proposed hybrid metaheuristic outperforms other metaheuristics and manual scheduling in terms of both computation time and solution quality. The presented solution procedure is implemented in a real-world clinic, which is used as a case study. The developed scheduling technique reduced the time spent on scheduling by 93% and increased the satisfaction of the schedule by 21%, which further enhanced the operating efficiency and service quality.

Despite extensive research on occupational health and safety, the role of safety intervention on performance remains underexplored. Understanding how different integrated safety intervention practices influence sustainable performance could unlock new avenues. This study aimed to investigate the influence of integrated safety intervention practices on economic, social and environmental performance. A survey was conducted in the Zimbabwe service industry and 242 useable responses were obtained. By means of structural equation modelling, we analyzed the effect of management safety intervention, human safety intervention and technical safety intervention on the three dimensions of sustainability. Our findings suggest that safety intervention practices lead to improved sustainable performance. However, the relationship between management safety intervention and sustainable performance is indirect and mediated by human and technical safety intervention. These insights could inform organizations that adopting safety intervention practices is more than compliance with regulations and further shed light on those who are not sure what other benefits besides improving workplace safety can be attained through adopting safety intervention practices.

Hospitals need to identify issues of greater importance on waste management because the implementation of many different strategies may lead to an unconscious increase in costs. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to define the most effective waste management strategies in the service industry. For this purpose, a novel fuzzy decision-making model is proposed that has two different stages. In this context, six JCI-based indicators are weighted by using sine trigonometric fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) methodology. Additionally, a comparative evaluation has also been conducted with sine trigonometric fuzzy Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) technique to check the reliability of the findings. On the other hand, five different strategy alternatives are selected by considering the principles of the integrated waste management hierarchy approach. These items are evaluated by considering sine trigonometric fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity (TOPSIS). On the other side, these factors are also ranked with the help of sine trigonometric fuzzy Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS) to test the consistency of the results. The main contribution is that prior strategies can be presented to the hospitals to have appropriate waste management process by defining the most important factors. Criteria weighting and alternative ranking results are the same in all combinations. Therefore, it is seen that the proposed model creates coherent and consistent results. It is defined that efficient storage of waste is the key issue to have effective waste management process. Moreover, \'reduce\' is found as the most critical stage of this process.

Digital technology enables the service industry to develop rapidly, which also brings about the increase of carbon emissions in the service industry (CESI). How to better integrate the service industry into China\'s carbon emission reduction model has become an important content that the Chinese government needs to pay attention to. This paper uses the industry-level panel data of the service in 30 provinces of China from 2008 to 2019 to examine the relationship between the degree of digital technology and CESI through theoretical and empirical methods. The results reveal that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between digital technology and CESI, and the effect of digital technology on curbing CESI is limited. Furthermore, the pilot policy of carbon market reduces CESI by 173.17 Mt and CESI per 10,000 people by 0.0065 Mt. Resource differences, regional differences and industrial structure differences bring about heterogeneous impacts. The Chinese government in particular, and the government established by the carbon emission reduction model should pay attention to promoting the digital transformation of the service industry to achieve the carbon emission reduction target, but the digital transformation of the service industry should be carried out in a hierarchical and orderly manner under the coordination of the government.

COVID-19 has changed many aspects of the hospitality and tourism industry, including technology-oriented and contactless solutions. Despite the increasing number of service companies using robots on their premises, most of the previous attempts and practices of adoption have remained unsuccessful. Prior research hints that socioeconomic factors could influence the successful adoption of these emerging technologies. Nevertheless, these studies ignore the role of profile factors and assume a homogenous response to using robots in service operations during the pandemic. Based on the theory of diffusion of innovation and a sample of 525 participants, this study investigates the differences in customers\' attitudes, their level of involvement, and optimism for service robots as well as their intentions to use service robots in the five main areas of hotel operations (front desk, concierge, housekeeping, room service, and food and beverage) based on five profile factors (age, gender, income level, education, and purpose of trip). MANOVA tests show significant differences in all variables based on demographic factors; male, younger, more educated, higher income, and leisure travelers show more positive attitudes, higher involvement, optimism, and intention to use service robots across various hotel departments. In particular, mean scores were found to be smaller for the traditionally human-oriented functional areas of the hotel operations. We also clustered the participants based on their level of comfort and optimism about using service robots in hotels. Given the rapid changes in the service industry and the increasing adoption of service robots, this paper adds a much-needed contribution to the ongoing research on service robots in the service industry by investigating the impact of profile factors on guests\' behavior towards service robots.

This was a daily diary study using intensive longitudinal methods to evaluate the dynamic structure of relationships among employees\' self-reported health, psychological capital, daily workplace incivility, and daily emotional exhaustion. We recruited 200 participants working in health and fitness clubs for experience sampling and had them file the same questionnaires for 10 consecutive working days. A total of 179 participants (men = 57, 31.85%; women = 122, 68.15%) completed the questionnaires, with a response rate of 89.5%, leading to 1790 data points at the within-person level. We used a multilevel location-scale model of dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM) for data analysis. We ran the model in Mplus software (version 8.4) and found an autoregressive \'carry over\' relationship between the previous day\'s emotional exhaustion changes on current emotional exhaustion changes (γ10 = 0.067, CI = [0.003, 0.132]). Daily workplace incivility significantly and positively predicted daily emotional exhaustion at the within-person level (γ20 = 0.953, CI = [0.465, 1.489]). Self-reported health was negatively associated with a person\'s mean ratings of daily emotional exhaustion (γ20 = -0.256, CI = [0.465, 1.489]) and moderated the strength of the workplace incivility effect on emotional exhaustion (γ21 = -0.201, CI = [-0.292, -0.121]). Finally, psychological capital was negatively related to a person\'s mean ratings of daily emotional exhaustion (γ02 = -0.240, CI = [-0.377, -0.102]).

This study aims to investigate the effects of work-life balance, work environment, and reward and compensation on employee retention in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were collected online from employees within the service industry in Malaysia. Partial least square structure equation modeling was used to test the model and hypotheses. The results reveal that work-life balance and work environment had a strong positive effect on employee retention, but reward and compensation had a much stronger positive effect on employee retention. This research provides unique theoretical contributions by investigating these factors in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak as components of the reciprocal process between employee and employer, and their effects on employee retention. This study also provides vital insights to business organizations to consider designing effective employee retention plans for a successful business.

Service industry workers experience challenging labor conditions in the United States, including pay below the minimum wage, expected emotional labor, and harassment. Additionally, in part because they work long shifts in high stress environments in restaurants and bars, many build and form personal workplace relationships (PWRs). In 2021, we interviewed 38 service industry workers and managers during the COVID-19 pandemic where we examined occupational challenges they faced in the state of Texas, USA. Through our interpretive research, this essay showcases our inductive findings on how service industry workers and managers utilize communication to create and sustain PWRs. We identified how some PWRs are sustained through a unique form of occupational identification that cultivates a \"service industry family\", which we term familial personal workplace relationships (familial PWRs). This extends past organizational communication scholarship on family to consider occupational identification. Furthermore, our research reveals that while PWRs may build communities through care and support, they also perpetuate organizational violence, like sexual harassment and bullying.

Existing literatures on energy carbon emissions mainly focus on high-energy industries such as electricity, transportation, and construction, while there are few researches on energy carbon emissions of relatively low-carbon industries such as the service industry. But with the service sector accounting for more than one-half of China\'s national economy, its carbon emissions are increasingly not negligible. Based on this, we use the structural decomposition model, input-output analysis method, and energy consumption method to study the structural factors influencing energy carbon emissions in China\'s service industry from 2007 to 2017. The results show that (1) the pressure and space of energy carbon emission reduction of the service industry are still huge in the future. Specifically, in the sample range, although the excessive growth of the energy carbon emissions of the service industry has been alleviated, the proportion of high-carbon energy in the energy carbon emissions of the service industry is still high, and the optimization of the energy consumption structure has not been significantly improved. (2) During the sample period, the energy utilization efficiency of the service industry has been significantly optimized and improved, which leads to the inhibition of the energy intensity effect on the growth of carbon emissions of the service industry. However, it should be noted that the emission reduction effect exerted by the energy intensity effect over time shows a tired trend. Therefore, in the future, the control of energy carbon emissions in the service industry needs to take multiple approaches to work together. (3) Input structure effect, energy structure effect, and final demand effect promote the growth of service industry energy carbon emissions. This also indicates that in the sample range, the service industry as the final demand product has the characteristics of high carbonization, the generalized technological progress of the input structure effect has not been improved, and the energy consumption structure on the supply side of the service industry has not been optimized. Therefore, China\'s service industry still has great potential for emission reduction from the above three aspects in the future. The research results provide a theoretical analysis basis and practical guidance for more accurate and efficient emission reduction in the service industry from the input-output perspective.

Such large-scale disruptions as the pandemic increase the uncertainty and risk related to business. Therefore, the business continuity management (BCM) has become an essential technical solution for enterprise emergency response. Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 has spread worldwide at an alarming rate causing many threats to sustainable development of the business sector. The decline in consumer demand has hugely impacted service industries, such as wholesale and retail sales, tourism. Enterprise production and operations have faced severe challenges. In this study, we develop a risk factor analysis of BCM under the presence of COVID-19 in China. Based on a statistical survey of 940 enterprises in Hangzhou City, China, this study employs ordinal logistic regression to explore the hindering effect of risk factors introduced by the epidemic on business performance. Then, the interpretive structure model (ISM) is applied to analyze the hierarchical structure of the factors under examination. The key factors influencing the enterprise production and operation during COVID-19 outbreak significantly differ across the sub-sectors of the service industry. Therefore, this paper assesses the resilience of the productive technologies and business models of different industries amid the pandemic. This paper proposes epidemic prevention and control strategy focusing on investment and government regulation to ensure sustainable business development.