Managerial Approaches toward Service Quality: The Case of Three Service Organisations

Using a multiple case study, this paper is concerned with assessing the impact of senior management’s approach and attitudes on service quality and its implications for middle and first line managers. Date from 52 semi-structured interviews representing a variety of managerial levels suggests that there exist many conflicts and differences in senior management’s orientation and approach toward QM with that of middle and first line managers. The results further indicate that getting such consistency appropriate to the needs of top, middle and first line management, and of the QM itself, is one of the key problems of current management of service quality. However, the findings highlights that where there is consistency between senior managers’ underlying approaches toward service quality goal with that of middle and first line managers, service quality programmes will highly likely produce expected results. Finally, the implications of these findings as well as future research are put forward.

Key Words: Managing Service Quality; Service Sector; Case Study Research.