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Service Business
Published in: Service Business 3/2015

01-09-2015 | Empirical article

Interpersonal service quality of the Chinese: determinants and behavioral drivers

Published in: Service Business | Issue 3/2015

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Abstract

The limited explanatory power of service quality models outside their nascent Western contexts is in no small part due to the significant role of cultures in constructing customers’ interpretations. While the Chinese are globally significant, we lack understanding of service quality for these customers. We report service quality determinants and explain customers’ interpretation as artifacts of Chinese culture. Our findings, based on a substantive multi-stage research design, report six service quality dimensions of professionalism, comfortableness, sense of sincerity, respect, active service and chin-chieh. We also report how behavioral drivers act to form evaluations of this Chinese service quality. Our proposed interpretation of Chinese service quality advances the discourse in this area in a way that provides both managers and researchers with a sound platform to understand customers’ evaluations outside those familiar to the Western world.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
We acknowledge that service quality research in the Western worlds is not homogeneous. In this report, WSQ is loosely defined as service quality studies that are explicitly or implicitly founded in the Western worldview which stresses the individualistic and independent evaluation of the service encounters.
 
2
The preference for abstraction creates a sense of the decontextualized (i.e., acultural inference) that invites the assumptions of universal applicability referred to in the paper’s opening paragraphs. Under this Western approach contextual factors are either assumed absent or reduced to, and treated as, separate variables (Ji et al. 2000). This acontextual focus characterizes the “rock bottom” approach to methodological individualism while the inclusion of contextual factors represents a weaker version of the same ontological position (Hedström and Swedberg 1996). Under Chinese relationalism actors, entities and objects are understood as contiguous. This directs attention to these interconnections in a way that differs from the Western preference for seeking and ascribing (abstract) properties to the target objects (e.g., Nisbett et al. 2001). The situated nature of Chinese shapes thought and behavior contrasts with the individualist Western view (Chiu 1972).
 
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Metadata
Title
Interpersonal service quality of the Chinese: determinants and behavioral drivers
Publication date
01-09-2015
Published in
Service Business / Issue 3/2015
Print ISSN: 1862-8516
Electronic ISSN: 1862-8508
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11628-014-0238-x

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