The Antecedents Of Internal Service Quality

Hotel industry is a typical service industry,while quality service has become the core of its management.The front-line service personnel of hotels are those who have the closest and the most frequent contact with customers.Their service consciousness and service ability are directly related to the service quality received by customers.Therefore,the service orientation of front-line service personnel is the key to improve customers' satisfaction and loyalty,and improving the service quality of staff is the key to win the market competitiveness.As is mentioned above,Chinese hotel managers usually attach great importance to the quality of service for customers,but they often do not attach equal importance to providing internal service for staff.In fact,many foreign scholars agree that"internal service quality is the premise of customers' service quality",that is,to improve customer service quality,we must first attach importance to internal service quality.In this regard,the research of this paper mainly starts from the following aspects:first,select three key variables(cooperation culture,reward system,departmental service-oriented leadership)in the organizational variables from the aspects of culture,institution and leadership and explore the impact of organizational variables on internal service quality;second,set up a theoretical model of internal service quality and internal service orientation on the basis of social exchange theory and social support theory.This paper explores the intermediary role of internal service orientation between organizational variables and internal service quality.The questionnaire is carried out for the hotel managers and frontline service staff in 3 five-star hotels and 5 four-star hotels in Fujian province.The heads of the department evaluated their directly-subordinated staff and form a 1:1 pairing with the frontline service staff questionnaire,and finally collected 190 valid questionnaires.In this study,confirmatory factor analysis,descriptive statistical analysis and correlation analysis,and hierarchical regression analysis were used to test and verify the data and research hypotheses.The results show that cooperation culture,reward system and departmental service-oriented leadership have a significant positive impact on internal service quality.Internal service ability has a significant positive impact on internal service quality,and internal service orientation plays a part of intermediary role between cooperation culture,reward system,departmental service leadership and internal service quality.This study enriches the research achievements in the field of internal service quality,and provides guidance and reference for improving the internal service quality of high-star hotels.