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• Empowerment for service recovery in Sri Lankan hotels must be understood as multidimensional. • Human resource management in these hotels fosters job competence to address service failures. • Supervisors have greater job autonomy and impact and are rated more highly in service recovery. • Empowerment in these hotels is hierarchical: it is carefully stage-managed and 'staircased'. • Greater autonomy for service workers would help to enhance their job satisfaction. This study tests the argument that human resource management in hotels enhances service-recovery performance and job satisfaction through empowering front-line employees to respond to service failures. After an initial phase of qualitative interviewing, dyadic data were gathered through a large-scale survey in thirty hotels in Sri Lanka. The results of structural equation modelling show that the HR practices and management styles adopted in this context help to develop job competence, which is then related to service-recovery performance and job satisfaction. However, they show that service recovery is carefully stage-managed and 'staircased' in this hotel context with empowerment strongly related to hierarchical level. Empowerment to address service failures is important in these hotels but it is deliberately graduated according to rank. While employee training shows benefits for both parties, greater job autonomy would enhance the well-being of these service workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Novel cell therapies derived from human T lymphocytes are exhibiting enormous potential in early-phase clinical trials in patients with hematologic malignancies. Ex vivo modification o fT cells is currently limited to a small number of centers with the required infrastructure and expertise. The process requires isolation, activation, transduction, expansion and cryopreservation steps. To simplify procedures and widen applicability for clinical therapies, automation of these procedures is being developed. The CliniMACS Prodigy (Miltenyi Biotec) has recently been adapted for lentiviral transduction ofT cells and here we analyse the feasibility of a clinically compliant T-cell engineering process for the manufacture ofT cells encoding chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) for CD 19 (CAR19), a widely targeted antigen in B-cell malignancies. Using a closed, single-use tubing set we processed mononuclear cells from fresh or frozen leukapheresis harvests collected from healthy volunteer donors. Cells were phenotyped and subjected to automated processing and activation using TransAct, a polymeric nanomatrix activation reagent incorporating CD3/CD28-specific antibodies. Cells were then transduced and expanded in the CentriCult-Unit of the tubing set, under stabilized culture conditions with automated feeding and media exchange. The process was continuously monitored to determine kinetics of expansion, transduction efficiency and phenotype of the engineered cells in comparison with small-scale transductions run in parallel. We found that transduction efficiencies, phenotype and function of CAR19T cells were comparable with existing procedures and overall T-cell yields sufficient for anticipated therapeutic dosing. The automation of closed-system T-cell engineering should improve dissemination of emerging immunotherapies and greatly widen applicability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]