PurposeThe purpose of this article is to identify the key factors that impede service quality delivery in the context of luxury hotels (four‐ and five‐star properties) in Sydney, Australia.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical dataset for this qualitative study was collected through 22 individual semi‐structured interviews with senior hotel managers of ten luxury hotels in Sydney, Australia. The technique used for analysing the data was progressive comparative analysis, after which constant comparative methodology was applied. The key themes emerging from these techniques have been categorised to form conclusions.FindingsAnalysis of the data revealed a number of impediments to developing and maintaining distinguishable, superior service. These impediments fell into four broad areas: Budget constraints, Staff attitude, Lack of mentoring and High customer expectations.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations with the current study are primarily related to the scope of the research in terms of the number of hotel properties participating, and the fact that it incorporates the views of managers only. Furthermore, the focus of this study was on the hotel sector, and thus the findings cannot be accepted as being necessarily relevant and applicable to services across the tourism/hospitality industry as a whole. Future research needs to be conducted to incorporate the views of all stakeholders in service quality, including non‐management staff and customers.Originality/valueThe findings of this research can inform hotel sector researchers and practitioners of identified impediments to service quality, whether current strategies are addressing these impediments and, if not, how strategies may be modified to address to achieve this.

Organisational professional conflict, as a result of hybridity and divergent managerial and clinical objectives, can cause conflict which affects other organisational members and this conflict may have implications for the efficiency of the health care organisation. The extension or duality of organisational professional conflict that causes interpersonal or group conflict in other members of the organisation, to the authors' knowledge, has not yet been researched.

Abstract:The performance gap between hospital spending and outcomes is indicative of inefficient care delivery. Operational failures-breakdowns in internal supply chains that prevent work from being completed-contribute to inefficiency by consuming 10% of nurses' time (Hendrich et al. 2008, Tucker 2004. This paper seeks to identify organizational factors associated with operational failures, with a goal of providing insight into effective strategies for removal. We observed nurses on medical/ surgical units at two hospitals, shadowed support staff who provided materials, and interviewed employees about their internal supply chain's performance. These activities created a database of 120 operational failures and the organizational factors that contributed to them. We found that employees believed their department's performance was satisfactory, but poorly trained employees in other departments caused the failures. However, only 14% of the operational failures arose from errors or training. They stemmed instead from multiple organizationally-driven factors: insufficient workspace (29%), poor process design (23%), and a lack of integration in the internal supply chains (23%). Our findings thus suggest that employees are unlikely to discern the role that their department's routines play in operational failures, which hinders solution efforts. Furthermore, in contrast to the "Pareto Principle" which advocates addressing "large" problems that contribute a disproportionate share of the cumulative negative impact of problems, the failures and causes were dispersed over a wide range of factors. Thus, removing failures will require deliberate crossfunctional efforts to redesign workspaces and processes so they are better integrated with patients' needs.

Using POSH, this paper examines what consumers and practitioners value about health services; it also illustrates how brilliance can be theorized into health service management research and practice.

To the best of the authors' knowledge this is the first comprehensive report applying lean flows to pathology laboratory remodelling and one of the few applications of Lean Systems Thinking between departments and between separate health services organisations.