questionnaire was subjected to a process of expert judging (Hair et al. 2006: 781;
Hardesty and Bearden 2004). The draft questionnaire was circulated amongst the
PhD supervisory team (Dr Peter Lugosi with expertise in hospitality studies and
Prof Adam Blake with expertise in survey design for multivariate statistical
analysis), Dr Caroline Hattam (a personal friend with expertise in survey-based
econometric analysis of organisational decision-making) and Mr Alan Cutler, the
Chief Executive of Hospitality Leadership Ltd training and consultancy
organisation and author of various articles and books examining leadership issues
in hospitality businesses (e.g. Cutler 2006; Cutler et al. 2006; Cutler 2010).
A number of modifications to item statement wordings were made based on the
feedback from these individuals regarding the brevity, clarity and face validity of
the item statements. An additional item statement was added at this stage.
Following the hospitality leadership work of Tracey and Hinkin (1994, 1996) and
the more general transformational leadership theory work of Bass and Avolio (see
e.g. Bass and Avolio 2004), MC1 ‘I clearly understand what my company’s goals /
targets are’ was added as a measure of Mission Clarity. Employees’ Mission
Clarity (clear understanding of organisational goals) is hypothesised to be an
outcome of transformational leadership and Tracey and Hinkin (1996) found that
transformational leadership had a significant and moderate ( = 0.31) effect on
hospitality employees’ mission clarity.
Following these modifications, the survey was pre-tested during March 2010 (the
pre-test survey form is illustrated in Appendix VI) using a cohort of Bournemouth
University hospitality management undergraduate students (n = 39) who
provided additional feedback regarding the clarity of the item statements. Three
minor changes to the wordings of item statements were made based on the
students’ feedback. In addition, some concerns about the clarity of the Service
Quality (SQ) item statements were raised. No modifications were made to the SQ
statements, however, as it was realised that this construct was attempting to
capture quite a complex phenomenon (employees’ ability to maintain customer
satisfaction in the face of adverse service conditions).
Following the expert judging and student-based pre-test, the questionnaire was
piloted using an actual sample of waiting staff in commercial hotel business (the
pilot survey form is illustrated in Appendix VII). The objective of this pilot survey
was to trial the survey administration method and to trial the questionnaire with
‘real’ respondents. Before describing the administration of the pilot survey,