engleski

Cultural influences on perceived service quality

During past 30 years, services marketing, as a separate field of academic interest, emerged as an important discipline in business studies. One of the livelier areas of research in services has been that of definition and measurement of service quality. Since linkage between quality and organisational performance has been well established in many academic papers, the need for deepening of understanding of service quality construct and its measurement is easily understandable. Although there have been no finite agreements on a number of issues regarding the concept of service quality, the importance of understanding the issues related to services marketing and services quality management cannot be overstated. Recent period has seen another important addition to the on-going debate regarding services quality definition and measurement - the analysis of cultural influences on customer's perception of service quality. As it has been noted in various papers looking at relationships between culture and consumer behaviour – culture, as a set of beliefs and learned behaviours, shapes the way individuals go about performing their tasks and perceiving outside world. Linking culture, thus defined, with ‘ interactive’ nature of services, it becomes clear that individual’ s cultural background could be an important factor in determining performance standards for service activities. Thus, in this article the author presents an overview of studies looking into questions of cultural influences on perceived service quality and attempts to indicate potential topics of interest for further academic research within this field.

Service quality measurement; services marketing; national culture

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