The impact of organizational culture on internal service quality : a case study of three hotels in Malaysia

• Main Author: Othman, Mohhidin
• Published: University of Strathclyde 2006
• Subjects: 647.94068
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.426306

Organizational culture has been a long-standing area of research in more traditional business management research, however to date few, if any, studies have attempted to consider how employees are servicing each other within an organization's own cultural environment. In an innovative attempt to link organizational culture (OC) to internal service quality (ISQ), this thesis develops a case study of three hotels in Malaysia based on in-depth interviews and a semi-quantitative technique, Profile Accumulation Technique (PAT). The thesis reports evidence from 36 semi-structured interviews with managerial and operational staff, complemented by 320 PAT responses. For this study, Ogbonna and Harris' (2002) framework is used to demonstrate how and where organizational culture can affect employees' ISQ performance. The concept of ISQ in hotel is based on Caruana and Pitt (1997), Paraskevas (2001) and White and Rudall (1999) but a free response PAT by Johns and Lee-Ross (1995) was used in examining the ISQ where qualitative data was collected and yet assessed quantitatively, as it provides an alternative to Parasuraman et al.'s, (1988) conventional survey questionnaires. A qualitative technique was used to construct a nine dimension organizational culture profile (OCP), and PAT analysis was used to draw a nine dimension Internal Service Quality Profile (ISQP) for all the organizations. The main findings from this thesis suggest that the linkage between OC and ISQ is weak and the evidence suggests that different types of OC have different levels of impact on the employee ISQ. Their basic organizational practices are quite similar but the emphasis varies, based on organizational needs and affordability. Employee background, such as national culture, seems to play a lesser role in influencing organizational cultures. Some of the observable trends are that the higher star hotels, for example, employ a sophisticated recruitment and hiring policy while the l s higher staff turnover. The initial understanding of the link between OC and ISQ may benefit managers in the industry through replicating or benchmarking some of the positive practices to ensure better service provider and service receiver relationships in an organization.