Employee and Organizational Perspectives of Service Quality: A Cross-Cultural Study in Kuwait, United States and Saudi Arabia

Abstract

A cross-cultural and cross-industry study was conducted on the internal service quality of employees. In addition, other demographic factors such as education level and gender were examined. The results based on responses from a survey conducted on employees in the airlines and health services sector in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United States revealed no evidence of cross-cultural effects, while some cross-industry effects exist for some of the service quality dimensions. This is the first known study concerning internal service quality in a cross-cultural and multi-industry setting. The results show potential for future research in this area. Service management has been a topic for research for over three decades. Nascent studies began in the fields of marketing (Johnson, 1969) and operations (Sasser, 1976). Subsequently numerous researchers have looked into various aspects of managing service-oriented businesses. Johnston (1999) provides an excellent overview of the area from a multi-functional perspective. Service quality is a perception issue for the customer. SERVQUAL, the instrument mostly used for the measurement of service quality was developed by Parasuraman et al. (1985) in which the gap between perceived and expected quality levels are measured on the five factors of tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. A majority of the research has focused on using the external customer as the basis for measurement of a firm's service quality. However, researchers have rarely considered the internal perspective of service quality. By the internal perspective, we imply the view of the service providers within an organization concerning their perception of the level of service provided to customers. In such internal marketing models, each department or employee within an organization is designed to be customer oriented irrespective of whether the customer is an external customer or an internal customer like another department or an employee. Several studies have also examined the cross-cultural effect on service quality. These studies have primarily focused on the question of determining differences, if any, across customers originating from different cultural backgrounds. In this context, Hofstede's (1980) seminal work on culture forms the basis for this assumption. To the best of our knowledge, no research has investigated whether the effects of culture-based differences exist when one focuses on internal service quality. It is important to examine this cultural effect, if any, from the internal service provider's perspective. Large multinational corporations that have enterprises in a number of countries need to determine differences in the training and performance evaluation of employees. Therefore, the primary objective of this paper is to investigate the cross-cultural effects of internal service quality. We also studied the effects across specific industries to examine any significant differences. Therefore, this study fills an important gap in the current literature - it looks at the issue of internal service quality from cross-cultural and cross-industry standpoints. The remainder of the study is organized as follows: A presentation of theory, methodology, research questions and the associated hypotheses, an analysis of the data and presentation of results on the testing of the hypotheses. Finally, we draw conclusions to the research and directions for future research in this area. Theory Parasuraman et al. (1985)'s seminal research paper forms the basis of the instrument used in this study. Their SERVQUAL model has been extensively used in numerous studies and it has been applied to various settings. We modified the original instrument slightly to fit to the group that we were examining and theoretically formed the basis for this study from other cross-cultural and cross-industry perception of service quality. Various studies have looked at both of these aspects as defining factors that explain significant differences regarding the perceived service quality by external customers. …