|
Service Orientation, Service Quality, Satisfaction and Loyalty
621
interaction between individual employee’s personality traits and the service
environment.
The first researchers to assess service orientation in the restaurant indus-
try were Dienhart, Gregoire, and Downey (1991). Groves (1992) expanded
Dienhart et al.’s (1991) nine-item service orientation scale to 34. Both the
original and expanded versions comprised three constructs: customer focus,
organizational support, and service under pressure. The researchers argued
that the first view (service orientation as an innate personality trait) is
embedded in the customer focus construct, while the second view (service
orientation focusing on situational or environmental elements) is embedded
in organizational support and service under pressure. This study followed
Dienhart et al.’s (1999) integrative approach and defined service orientation
as a function of individual traits and environmental or situational factors.
Service Quality
In the early 1980s, the manufacturing industry implemented total quality
management (TQM) and similar approaches. As service did not resemble
physical goods due to its intangibility, heterogeneity, and inseparability of
production and consumption, it was difficult to define and measure the
concept of service quality (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1985). Unlike
quality concepts from the manufacturing sector, service quality experts in the
service industry developed a unique service quality concept using consumer
behavior models.
With the emphasis on the voice of the customer, service quality was
defined as the difference between customer expectations of service and the
perceptions of the actual service received (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry,
1988). This popular concept resulted in the creation of the SERVQUAL instru-
ment (Parasuraman et al., 1988). Originally, SERVQUAL was proposed as a
generic measure that could be applied to any service. However, Carman
(1990) indicated that SERVQUAL must be customized to the service in ques-
tion. In the hospitality industry, a modified version of SERVQUAL, DINESERV
was developed to measure service quality in restaurants (Stevens et al.,
1995).
Researchers have disagreed about the best way to operationalize the
SERVQUAL instrument (Cronin & Taylor, 1992; Parasuraman, Berry, &
Zeithaml, 1993). Cronin and Taylor (1992) demonstrated that the perceptions
battery alone explains more variances in the structural model. However,
Parasuraman et al. (1993) argued that the decision depends on the objec-
tive of the study; difference scores are useful for the purpose of diagnosing
service shortfalls, whereas perception ratings alone are useful when explain-
ing the variance in some dependent variables. Because the objective of this
study is to investigate the interrelationships (or causal relationships) among
the four constructs (service orientation, service quality, customer satisfaction,
622
H. J. Kim
and customer loyalty) in the structural model, it is deemed appropriate to
utilize the perceptions score of service quality rather than the gap score
(difference between expectations and perceptions of service performance).
Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
This study adopted Oliver’s (1981) concept of customer satisfaction. Oliver
(1981) defined customer satisfaction as the “summary psychological state
resulting when the emotion surrounding confirmed or disconfirmed expec-
tation is coupled with the consumer’s prior feelings about the consumption
experience” (p. 27). The term disconfirmation in this context relates to
the fulfillment of expectation, and may be positive (where product perfor-
mance exceeds expectations), negative (where product performance falls
below expectations), or zero (where performance equals expectations).
More specifically, an individual’s expectations are (a) confirmed when a
product performs as expected, (b) negatively disconfirmed when the prod-
uct performs more poorly than expected, and (c) positively disconfirmed
when the product performs better than expected. This paradigm, known
as confirmation
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: | 
