Psychometric Model for Service Firm’s Intellectual Stress Diagnosis and Management: Development and Validation

A modern service firm-a complex interaction of humans, technology, and corporate culture driven by knowledge and digitalization-is susceptible to intellectual stress (istress) as do humans. This is because both have intellectual capability-intellectual capital (IC) for service firms and competence for humans. However, studies on the istress of firms are famished. As with humans, addressing this issue will help improve the value production capability and competitiveness of service firms. This study sets for itself two objectives: (i) identify the intellectual stressors (istressors) and inhibitors of istress on service firms and (ii) develop and validate a model for the diagnosis and management of istress in service firms. Mediating the transactional theory of stress and coping (TTSC) model, a conceptual model was formulated. The candidate constructs and indicators of the model were extracted from the literature via systematic and scoping reviews. These constructs were aggregated and streamlined into a questionnaire consisting of 108 indicator questions. The questionnaire was randomly administered online using Google Forms. A total of 185 (55.89%) valid individual responses were codified and loaded into SmartPLS4 for PLS-SEM assessments of the conceptual model including its ablated forms. The standard istressors and inhibitors of istress on firms have been validly identified. The istress value for the service industry has been estimated as -0.323. An operational model for service firm's istress diagnosis and management, christened MISS, has been developed and validated. MISS is capable of reverting istress of service firms from distress to eustress. The MISS implementation guide is also presented.