Applying Service Profit Chain model to the Korean restaurant industry

The purpose of this study is to empirically determine the relationship between employees’ constructs such as internal service quality, service ability, employee satisfaction, and organizational commitment, and customers’ constructs such as perceived value, customer satisfaction, customer trust, and loyalty. This relationship was studied by applying the Service Profit Chain model to the Korean restaurant industry. Results show that internal service quality has a significant effect on service ability, and teamwork/communication has a significant effect on employee satisfaction. Employees’ organizational commitment has a significant direct effect on the value perceived by customers. Ultimately, there is an indirect influential relationship between employees’ and customers’ constructs. Implications of these results are discussed, and possible limitations of the study are addressed.     

Factors affecting the knowledge sharing attitude of hotel service personnel

The accumulation and sharing of knowledge is an important managerial approach to attracting customers and increasing customer satisfaction. However, knowledge sharing is not an automatic behavior. The primary purpose of this study is to understand the organizational and personal factors motivating employees to share knowledge. Personnel in international tourist hotels in Taipei who provide front-line services for travelers were surveyed. This study shows that internal marketing and organizational culture influence knowledge-sharing attitudes and perceived behavioral control. In addition, perceived behavioral control influences the relations among internal marketing, organizational culture, and knowledge-sharing attitudes. This research suggests that to develop knowledge-sharing attitudes among personnel that benefit customer service, it is important for managers to model supportive attitudes, give actual support in forms such as bonuses and resources, and develop a culture that encourages personnel to attempt innovation.     

Linking AI quality performance and customer engagement: The moderating effect of AI preference

Drawing upon affordance theory, this study positions artificial intelligence (AI) as a commercial service in examining its influence on customer engagement in the hotel context. In particular, we seek to understand linkages between customer perceptions of AI service quality, AI customer satisfaction and engagement. Given the multiplicity of services offered by service organisations, customers’ preference for AI service is modelled as a moderator of customer perceptions and attitudes towards AI. Data was collected from a sample of hotel customers in Australia who had previously used AI tools or services. Our results reveal a significant chain effect between AI service indicators, service quality perceptions, AI satisfaction and customer engagement. AI preference has a significant moderation effect on information quality and satisfaction. These findings provide new insights into the consumer services literature and have important implications for marketing practitioners.     

How to fuel employees’ prosocial behavior in the hotel service encounter

With mounting customer expectation for excellent service, frontline service employees’ prosocial service behavior is of great importance since it helps enhance customers’ perceived service quality, which is critical for maintaining a hotel’s competitive advantage relative to its comp set. Regardless of the importance of prosocial service behavior, role clarity, perceived organizational support, and psychological empowerment in encouraging employees’ prosocial service behavior has not received much attention. This study examines the effects of the above three predictors on the prosocial service behavior of customer-contact employees. The authors developed a conceptual model of prosocial service behavior and empirically tested it using structural equation modeling. The findings suggest that role clarity and psychological empowerment have a direct influence on prosocial service behavior. Psychological empowerment partially mediates the relationship between role clarity and prosocial service behavior and fully mediates the relationship between perceived organizational support and prosocial service behavior.     

Employee Commitment and Restaurant Profitability

Abstract

A pilot study was conducted in two Las Vegas restaurants. Both restaurants were operating at a loss and suffering from a lack of employee commitment. Previous research has identified a relationship between effective people management and a firm's financial success. In response to managers' request, this study applies qualitative methods to explore the underlying reasons for the lack of employee commitment. The study concluded that the employees did not identify with their companies' values, which was manifested in their complete lack of internalization levels of commitment. Management implications include the need to communicate the companies' values to the employees and the establishment of a service culture in order to create employee and customer loyalty.     

Burnout and Service Employees' Willingness to Deliver Quality Service

ABSTRACT

Employees are vital for enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty in service organizations because their proactive involvement is an essential part of delivering the services offered. With the recent rapid growth of tourism in the Macau SAR, service employee workloads are clearly increasing, and consequently one would expect that the incidence of job burnout is rising. This study uses the well-known Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) to investigate the relationship between service employees' burnout and their willingness to deliver quality services. Self-administered questionnaires from 110 operational staff in three hotels in Macau have been analyzed. The results indicate that job burnout reduces staff's willingness to deliver quality services and that this effect is moderated by individual staff's level of affective organizational commitment, and their perceptions of the extent of organizational and supervisor support provided by the organization. Based on these results, practical managerial strategies to improve service performance are identified.     

Customer co-creation of travel services: The role of company support and customer satisfaction with the co-creation performance

The tourism industry is characterized by high-contact services in which co-creation of customers plays a major role. This paper develops a conceptual model of customer co-creation of tourism services and empirically tests this model in a travel agency context. Applying a SEM-approach, company support for customers is found to significantly affect the degree of customer co-creation. The degree of co-creation further positively affects customer satisfaction with the service company, customer loyalty, and service expenditures. A test of the moderating effect of the customers' satisfaction with their own co-creation performance on satisfaction with the service company and on service expenditures suggests that those customers who are satisfied with their co-creation activities spend more on their travel arrangements, but that they are less satisfied with the company. Important implications for co-creation theory and practice in high-contact service industries can be derived.     

The COVID-19 pandemic: The mitigating role of government and hotel support of hotel employees in Egypt

We investigated the effect of government support of hotels on hotels' employee support (namely, health support, staff retention, and staff training) and consequently on employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment, through the moderating role of perceived overall organizational justice and ethical climate, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a quantitative approach and a framework that drew on the stakeholder and organizational support theories, we collected data from 669 employees in Egyptian hotels through a web-based survey. The results support the proposed framework and show a positive effect of government support through the strengthened perception of perceived overall organizational justice. Surprisingly, findings indicated that the association between job satisfaction and organizational commitment is significantly and negatively influenced by hotel ethical climate. Furthermore, job satisfaction partially mediates the association between hotels’ support of employees and organizational commitment. The study holds important implications for both theory and practice.     

Crafting and testing a central precept in service-dominant logic: Hotel employees’ brand-citizenship behavior and customers’ brand trust

Employees play an important role in hotel service branding. Their enactments of positive brand-supportive behaviors help nurture positive customer–brand relationships. This study explores the relationship between employee perceived organizational support, brand citizenship behavior, and customers’ perceptions of brand trust. Two questionnaire surveys were carried out in high-contact hotel service firms collecting employee and customer data by matched-questionnaires. The results of the study indicate that brand-citizenship behavior consists of three components: willingness-to-help, brand enthusiasm, and propensity for further development. Propensity for further development has a significant direct positive effect on the other two components, and the other two components both have significant direct positive effects on customer's brand trust. Employee-perceived higher levels of organizational support increase performance of brand citizenship behavior. The study includes empirical findings, contributions to theory, limitations, and direction for future research.     

酒店服务品牌内部建设主体的功能与关系研究

服务品牌与产品品牌在原理上一致,但在执行上存在明显差别。服务品牌的建设应该包括内部和外部两个视角,但是现有理论及实践往往仅关注服务品牌外部建设,忽略了服务品牌内部建设。因此,文章基于丽思卡尔顿酒店的案例,探索服务品牌内部建设涉及哪些参与者、各参与者承担哪些角色,以及服务品牌内部与外部建设之间的关系等问题。研究发现,酒店企业服务品牌内部建设的关键流程包括酒店创建者和高层管理者创建并维持服务品牌核心价值、核心价值转变为员工的内在价值、员工"活出品牌"3个方面。服务品牌内部建设与外部建设是"手段"与"目的"的关系,成功的服务品牌内部建设能够更好地确保外部建设的效果。最后,文章提出了酒店企业内部服务品牌建设的管理建议。     

Extra-Role Customer Service: The Roles of Leader–Member Exchange (LMX), Affective Commitment,and Psychological Empowerment

ABSTRACT

Based on the social exchange and job characteristic theories, this study advances a moderated-mediation model that tries to explain the social-psychological processes connecting the leader–member exchange (LMX) and extra-role customer service, and examined it by collecting data from employees and managers employed in tourist hotels operating in Uttarakhand, India. A hierarchical regression analysis determined that LMX was positively related to extra-role customer service where affective commitment mediated this relationship. Further, an analysis of a moderated-mediation path revealed that psychological empowerment strengthened the direct influences of LMX on affective commitment and its indirect influence on extra-role customer service. Based on these findings, important theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

Customer mistreatment and service performance: A self-consistency perspective

The service encounter is an important social context for hospitality service providers who strive to satisfy their need for job competence by delivering excellent customer service. Customer mistreatment may be perceived as a sign of work-related goal failure by hospitality service providers. Building on the literature of goal attainment and failure in the workplace, we propose that hospitality employees, who experience customer mistreatment, undergo diminished organization-based self-esteem (OBSE), decreasing service performance. Moreover, employees’ locus of control is proposed to interact with customer mistreatment and predict service performance through the mediation of OBSE. The results of a multi-wave and multi-source survey, administered to a sample of hotel frontline employees (N = 180) and their direct supervisors (N = 38), show that customer mistreatment has a negative influence on service performance through OBSE, but only among employees with an external locus of control.     

Do employees’ satisfied customers respond with an satisfactory relationship? The effects of employees’ satisfaction on customers’ satisfaction and loyalty in a family restaurant

The purpose of this study is to understand the interrelationships among employees’ satisfaction and customer's satisfaction and loyalty in a family restaurant. The study was administered to 69 employees and 258 customers. The results showed a positive relationship between employees’ satisfaction and customer satisfaction. However, employees’ satisfaction did not have a significant, direct impact on customer loyalty, but showed an indirect influence via customer satisfaction. In addition, customer satisfaction was positively associated with customer loyalty. Limitations and future research directions are also discussed.     

Procedural justice,ethical climate and service outcomes in restaurants

The literature suggests that ethical climate may actually contribute to organizational success by enhancing employee performance. Ethical climate is considered to be highly relevant to the hospitality industry, since it enhances service-providers’ contact with customers. This study reinforces previous researches by exploring the relationships between ethical climate, service, and customer satisfaction in restaurants. We have also examined the relationship between ethical climate and the fair treatment of employees by an organization. The study was conducted in 20 restaurants, with 171 employees and 103 customers. Data were obtained from employees, customers, and “mystery shoppers”. As expected, ethical climate was found to be related to service performance which, in turn, was found to fully mediate the relationship of ethical climate with customer satisfaction. Ethical climate was also found to correlate positively with procedural justice. Our results indicate the benefits of the ethical message conveyed through consistent managerial practices in service organizations.     

Disentangling green service innovative behavior among hospitality employees: The role of customer green involvement

Regardless of the role of customers in co-creating value with organizations, how customer involvement drives employees, particularly in the hospitality industry, to engage in green service innovative endeavors has been scarcely examined. This study seeks to uncover how and when customer green involvement nurtures green service innovative behavior among hotel employees. The dataset was formed from the responses from 519 employees and 84 managers working in Vietnam-based hotels and analyzed via multilevel structural equation modeling. The results demonstrated the role of hotel employees’ green information management motivations (i.e., green information proactiveness, transparency, and formality) in mediating the positive relationship between customer green involvement and employee green service innovative behavior. Internal green marketing orientation functioned as an enhancer for the effects of customer green involvement on green information management motivations. This research contributes to the stream of green behavior research by bringing together customer green involvement and green service innovative behavior in the hospitality literature and unraveling the mechanisms behind their relationship.     

The Relationships Between Food Service Wait Staff Skills,Satisfaction, Commitment and Their Levels of Customer Orientation

Abstract

Restaurants are in an industry that seems to be one of the most competitivein the nation. The challenges of operating in this particular industry are exacerbated bythe relative similarities that exist between many food service providers. One means that may be used to achieve a degree of differentiation may be through the restaurant's customer contact personnel, i.e., its wait staff. The restaurant's wait staff is an important factor in determining customer satisfaction and customer satisfaction in turn is an important determinant of the restaurant's profitability and longevity. The purpose of this research is to assess the relationships that exist between the wait staff's levels of customer orientation and their sales skills, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The results indicate that the positive relationships exist between the wait staff's customer orientation and their skills, job satisfaction and organizational commitment.     

Customer opportunistic complaints management: A critical incident approach

Although customer complaints are valued in the hospitality industry in order to create service recovery opportunities and improve service quality, there are occasions when customers knowingly and incorrectly report service failures or make illegitimate complaints. The purpose of this study is to investigate how service employees handle opportunistic customer complaints in service encounters. By using the critical incident technique, we classify 346 incidents from hotel and restaurant services based on complaint source, evidence, compensation, handling, follow-up, and customer return. Managerial implications for these challenging situations are discussed and suggestions are made for improvement.     

Fostering employee-customer identification: The impact of relational job design

By integrating insights from the literature on relational job design and relational identification, we provide theoretical and empirical account of whether relational job design can foster employee-customer identification (ECID) and subsequently, enhance service performance. This research suggests that relational job characteristics likely foster service employees’ ECID by relating employees to the positive impact they have on customers as well as by leading employees to gain valuable personal resources from customer interactions. Using time-lagged data collected from 255 frontline service employees matched with 92 supervisors in 47 restaurants, we found that job impact on customers positively influenced service performance, and this influence was mediated by ECID. Results also showed that job contact with customers positively influenced service performance, and this influence was partially mediated by ECID.     

Effect of experiential value on customer satisfaction with service encounters in luxury-hotel restaurants

Exactly how the restaurant industry creates good quality service experiences has attracted the attention of scholars and practitioners. Some scholars advocate creating high quality service encounters to enhance customer satisfaction. However, recent research has not examined hotel restaurant service, and a detailed understanding of its potential effects on the customer meal experience and customer satisfaction is needed. Consequently, this study of service encounters and restaurant consumer behavior constructed a comprehensive framework via a literature review. Empirical data were collected by a questionnaire distributed to luxury-hotel restaurant customers. The empirical results indicated that restaurant environmental factors and interactions with service employees and other consumers positively influence the consumer experiential value. Additionally, only interactive relationships with service employees directly and positively affect consumer satisfaction. Restaurant environment factors and interactions with other consumers indirectly and positively influence consumer satisfaction through experiential value. Finally, with respect to marketing and development initiatives, the results of this study can help improve the physical attractiveness of the examined luxury-hotel restaurants.     

An Empirical Study of the Effect of Customer Participation on Service Quality

Abstract

Using 185 completed surveys from hotel customers in Tianjin, China, the authors conducted a multiple regression analysis of the effects of information collection, participation in service design and standard build-up, interaction with employees, and “word of mouth” communication with hotel customers. It was found that these four dimensions of customer participation had a direct relationship with service quality.