result in fewer hotels agreeing to participate; and
of those who did agree to participate, fewer would return both employee and
customer surveys.
Further problematic issues surrounding the idea of a customer survey included the
practical consideration that hotel businesses would likely be resistant to
customers being burdened with requests to participate in (i) any survey and (ii)
particularly one that was not part of the business’s own quality assessment
programme. A further (methodological) consideration was that it would be
extremely difficult to ensure that the surveyed customers were responding to the
service they had from the responding employees (in order that the research could
claim to examine the leadership motivation → customer service causal link).
Based on the arguments and concerns discussed above, a method for measuring
service quality based on employee perceptions was sought. A search of the social
science literature revealed a study by Schneider et al. (1980) that found strong
correlations between customer and employee perceptions of a number of service-
related variables in 23 retail banks including general service quality (r = 0 .67;
p<0.01); this finding was replicated by Schneider and Bowen (1985) in a follow-
up study also based on banking organisations. Another banking-sector study to
evaluate correlations between employee perceptions of service climate and
customer perceptions of service quality was undertaken by Johnson (1996) and
found that employee perceptions of service climate correlated with overall
customer satisfaction (r = 0.40; p<0.01).
Bitner et al. (1994) interviewed employees in hotel, restaurant and airline
organisations and asked these employees to describe critical service encounters
that caused satisfaction or dissatisfaction for their customers. These data were
then compared with data from an earlier survey of hotel, restaurant and airline
organisations’ customers by the same research team (Bitner et al. 1990) where
customers were asked to describe critical service encounters that caused them
satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The 1994 study was designed to examine whether
‘...customers and employees report the same kinds of events and behaviors
leading to satisfaction and dissatisfaction in service encounters’ (Bitner et al.
1994: 97).
Bitner et al. (1994) sorted customer and employee responses into three
categories for comparison:
Group 1. Employee Response to Service Delivery and System Failures