DATA ANALYSIS

Data Analysis

Data Analysis and Result

Employee satisfaction

We intended to capture the degree to which service employees are satisfied with their job. We used indicators from the Job Descriptive Index ([Smith et al., 1969], [Jacobs and Solomon, 1977] and [Balzer et al., 1997]), which is widely adopted in psychology or organizational behavior research. We chose four questions out of the five classical satisfaction facets, namely salary, job nature, promotion, and relationship with colleagues listed in the Job Descriptive Index. We did not measure their relationship with supervisors. This is because such a relationship might highly depend on their performance in service delivery (Teas, 1981)—a close indicator of service quality in this research. Respondents were asked to rate on each item on a seven-point Likert-type scale anchored at 1 = “totally disagree” and 7 = “totally agree”.

Service quality

We adopted the SERVQUAL instrument developed by (Parasuraman et al., 1988) and (Parasuraman et al., 1991). The SERVQUAL instrument suggests there are five dimensions of perceived service quality, namely tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. Consistent with previous research on service quality (e.g., Gotlieb et al., 1994), we chose an item from each of the five dimensions that are most relevant to the service sectors being studied, instead of using all 22 items. Respondents were asked to rate each item on a seven-point Likert-type scale anchored at 1 = “totally disagree” and 7 = “totally agree”.

Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is defined as the pleasurable emotional state of a customer from their experience with a shop, i.e., a summary evaluative response ([Fornell, 1992] and [Anderson et al., 1994]). This summary response contains evaluations of the key facets that customers consider important in the service context (Oliver, 1997). Compared with more transaction-specific measures of performance, an overall evaluation is more likely to influence customer repurchases (Gustafsson et al., 2005). Four questions related to feature performance that drive satisfaction were developed, including enquiry service, price, customer service in transactions, and service handling of dissatisfaction ([Heskett et al., 1997], [Oliver, 1997] and [Gustafsson et al., 2005]). A seven-point Likert-type scale anchored at 1 = “totally disagree” and 7 = “totally agree” was used.

Firm profitability

Firm profitability reflects the financial performance of a shop. Consistent with previous research, we chose return on assets (ROA), return on sales (ROS), return on investment (ROI), and overall profitability as indicators ([Staw and Epstein, 2000] and [Schneider et al., 2003]). Perceptual data were obtained. We asked the shop in-charge persons to assess their shops' profitability relative to industry norms ([Delaney and Huselid, 1996] and [Sakakibara et al., 1997]) with regard to the above four indicators on a seven-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 = “much lower” to 7 = “much higher”. Although perceptual data may impose limitations through increased measurement error, the use of such measures is not without precedence ([Powell, 1995] and [Delaney and Huselid, 1996]). Researchers have found measures of perceived organizational performance data to correlate positively (with moderate to strong associations) with objective measures of firm performance ([Dollinger and Golden, 1992] and [Powell, 1992]).

Result

654 employees completed the 2010 Staff Attitude ...