The Relationships between Culture and Service Quality Perceptions

Abstract

The authors argue that perceptions of service quality vary across cultural groups, as defined by each culture's position on Hofstede's dimensions. They explicitly map the relationship between service quality perceptions and cultural dimension positions and draw the implications for international service market segmentation. They also test the hypotheses constituting their theoretical analysis. They show that the importance of SERVQUAL dimensions is correlated with Hofstede's cultural dimensions. They also used the correlation coefficients to compute a Cultural Service Quality Index that could be used to segment international service markets and allocate resources across segments.In 1994, Anderson and Fornell proposed "a customer satisfaction research prospectus" in the concluding chap-ter of the book on service quality edited by Rust and Oliver. One of the research questions they suggested was the investigation of systematic variation in satisfaction across nations. More specifically, they asked, "How does culture affect the level of satisfaction?" The answer to this question, they argued, would have important implications on how firms might allocate resources in different parts of the global economy. Since Anderson and Fornell asked their question, the relationship between culture and service quality/satisfaction has received increasing interests as suggested by the recent articles by Winsted (1997), Donthu andYoo (1998), andMattila (1999). These studies began to establish the links between cultural dimensions and service quality dimensions by studying a subset of possible relationships. In this article, we provide and test a conceptual link between all five cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede (1980Hofstede ( , 1991 and variations in the relative importance of all five service quality dimensionsThe authors thank Luis Toral and Gui Rakotoarijaonina from the University of Neuchâtel for collecting data in Switzerland.

Relationship Among E-Service Quality, Culture, Attitude, Trust, Risk of Online Shopping

“…Malhotra et al (1994) also conceptually speculated the possible links. Among the first to investigate the effect of culture on service quality are research works by Donthu and Yoo (1998) and Furrer et al (2000). In recent years, studies began to elaborate more on the relationship between culture and service quality (Ueltschy et al, 2009).…”

The influence of social capital on service quality evaluation

“…Donthu and Yoo, 1998, Winsted, 1997, Furrer et al, 2000, Mattila, 1999. Within the consumption and evaluation of services there were found to be culturally constructed norms of the roles that need to be performed in a service encounter.…”

“…While numerous researchers have examined the role that national cultural values play as an antecedent of the service quality (e.g. Donthu and Yoo, 1998, Winsted, 1997, Furrer et al, 2000, Mattila, 1999 there has been limited consideration of how the socio-cultural environment and economic status inform the evaluation of service provider-customer interactions (e.g. Imrie, 2005).…”

A SERVQUAL approach to identifying the influences of service quality on leasing market segment in the German financial sector

“…SERVQUAL method has been criticised for its universality of the five dimensions across different cultures and ethnicities (Furrer et al, 2000). Some criticised that if expectations are measured after the service was performed, they could be biased by the actual perceived service quality (Teas, 1993).…”