بررسی شرایط محیط کار و عملکرد کارکنان در مجموعه کاری چند فرهنگی Exploring service climate and employee performance in multicultural service settings

Introduction Despite a significant overlap in the conceptual and empirical domains of the service climate construct and the service-profit chain framework, there is hardly any attempt to theoretically integrate these two research streams to develop and empirically validate a comprehensive model of service climate (Bowen and Schneider, 2014; Hong et al., 2013). Hong et al. (2013) address this gap with a model of service climate, its antecedents and outcomes, and a meta-analysis of 58 studies (N = 9,363) to test their hypotheses. However, Hong et al. (2013) focus on the antecedents of service climate (e.g. leadership and HR practices) and do not differentiate between service climate and internal service quality, which may limit the future implications of their results (Bowen and Schneider, 2014). To address this limitation, Bowen and Schneider (2014) present a more comprehensive model with more antecedents of service climate and several moderators (including internal service quality), but they do not provide any empirical evidence about the relationships depicted in their model. As a result, there are still many research gaps and unanswered questions in this area, which we address in this paper. First, we focus on the lack of consensus about the relationship between service climate and internal service quality. Specifically, Bowen and Schneider (2014) cite Ehrhart et al. (2011) to include internal service quality as a moderator of the link between service climate and customer experience in their model, but they ignore the significant correlation of service climate with internal service quality reported by Ehrhart et al. (2011) and with external service quality (Martinez-Tur et al., 2011; Schneider, White and Paul, 1998) that would make its role as a moderator questionable. Moreover, Ehrhart et al. (2011) only studied the service climate at “branch-level” and internal service quality received from the “corporate” units, ignoring the service provided by branch employees to each other; thus, they only provide a partial view of the relationship between service climate and internal service quality. In fact, in a recent study, Chen (2013) shows that organization culture and leadership style (which are antecedents of service climate) also have an impact on internal service quality, which suggests that service quality may directly influence internal service quality. Hence, in this paper, we aim to further clarify and explore the relationship between service climate and internal service quality. Second, we address the lack of clarity on the impact of service climate and internal service quality on employee performance. Specifically, Hong et al.(2013)include service behavior, service performance and service quality as employee outcomes in their theoretical model; however, they study only one of these, service performance, in their meta-analysis. In contrast, Bowen and Schneider (2014) include both in-role behavior and customer-focused organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) as employee outcomes, but they ignore task performance in their service climate framework. Similarly, Chen (2013) does not study the impact of internal service quality on any other employee outcomes, and Ehrhart et al.