Studies On The Gap Model Of Internal Service Quality

With the theoretical development in service marketing area, the concept of internal marketing is rising and suffers more and more extensive value from the western academia and the business field as a branch of service marketing. As resources of external service quality and an important aspect of internal marketing, it seems to be particularly essential of the analysis and measurement of internal service quality. Yet, there are still little empirical research on it.According to the related theories of external service quality, this study construct the"Gap Model of Internal Service Quality"to verify and analyze the reason of internal service quality discrimination. Based on the similarity of internal and external service, combined with the authoritative method to measure the quality of external service——SERVQUAL, this study proceed an empirical research on: the scale to measure internal service quality; the dimension of internal service quality, the exist of each discrimination and the perception of each dimension's importance of the employers and employees, in the representative in service business——hotel industry. The specific research methods include: the reliability and validity of the scale (Cronbach'sαof the scale, Split-half reliability, the reliability of each dimension, Discriminant validity, Convergent validity ); the factor analysis method to get the dimensions of internal service quality; the independent-samples t-test and paired-samples t-test method to analyze every discrimination of internal service quality; the comparison of means to evaluate the sequence of every dimension.The results of this study implicate that it has high reliability and validity to measure internal service quality in enterprise using SERVQUAL ; like external service quality, the internal service quality can be explained by five dimensions, although the order of importance is different; and there is great difference in the perception of this five dimension's significance between the employers and employees. The chief originality of this study is to analyze the reason of internal service quality discrimination and put some preliminary ways to improve it forward systematically and empirically by applying the related theories of external service quality. This study also has certainly practice meaning, the enterprise can make use of above-mentioned results to verify the problems of its internal service and improve it, according to its own circumstance.