Conceptualising and measuring service culture

Abstract

RESEARCH QUESTIONS: 1: How can service culture be conceptualised?

2: How can service culture be measured?

Service culture relies on four principles for creating value, as defined by Ostrom, Bitner, Brown, Burkhard, Goul, Smith-Daniels, Demirkan and Rabinovich (2010). This research explores these principles and thus focuses on conceptualising and measuring service culture through the development of a conceptual model. The four principles as per Ostrom et al. (2010, pg 12) are as follows:

“(1) Recruiting, training and rewarding, (2) Developing a service mindset in product focused organizations, (3) Creating a learning service organization by harnessing employee and customer knowledge and, (4) Keeping a service focus as the organization grows and evolves”.

The conceptual model illustrates that an organization’s service culture is at its core oriented around service transformation. Among other things, continual change creates a service mindset and enables learning, knowledge creation and sharing amongst stakeholders. Service transformation helps an organization to incorporate training, reward employees and engage in co-creation. Service transformation is also important to service culture as it continually interacts with the process of service orientation and service climate (shared stakeholder perceptions of the service processes). To keep the organization focused on service and value creation as the organization grows and evolves, the service climate and service orientation will continually impact on the encounters and their value. Besides Ostrom et al., (2010), this research has also made use of the study by Davis and Gautam (2011) to further understand the literature around service culture.

This research has two studies. Study 1 is based upon the case study of Davis, Crotty and Hawkins (2010) and Davis (2013) to explore service culture (training, rewards, co-creation, climate, transformation, orientation, encounters and value) in a specific industry in Auckland, New Zealand in 2010. This initial phase of the research provides anecdotal evidence to support and elucidate the conceptual model. The discussion highlights the transformation of a service culture and the experiences of service employees. It was concluded that a conceptual model should converse how the firm and the consumer value is shaped from the relationships between training, rewards, co-creation, climate, transformation, service orientation and encounters.

Study 2, builds from Study 1 to measure and specify the conceptual model and hypotheses through a two-stage process of development: confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. This study is just proposed for further analysis as there is no interaction with any participants and no data has been collected for this research. The research ends with a discussion of managerial and future research directions.