Comparing Evaluations of Internal Service Quality within European and Chinese Cultures for Services provided by IT Departments

Abstract

Previous research has found that contextual factors influence service quality. However, very little cross-cultural research studying internal service quality (ISQ) has been conducted and no research has compared European and Chinese cultures ISQ evaluations. This study tries to fill that research gap by studying ISQ of services provided by the IT department in Estonia (a European culture) and Taiwan (a Chinese culture) and focusing on the influence of culture (both national culture and Hofstede’s culture dimensions) on ISQ evaluations. The influence of the amount of services received online is also under investigation. In order to adequately study differences in ISQ evaluations in Estonia and Taiwan, as well as the influence of contextual factors, data was collected simultaneously in Estonia and Taiwan. This resulted in 201 usable responses collected from Estonia and 202 from Taiwan. Findings from this study benefit both to the academic world and practitioners by adding to the knowledge about the influence of contextual factors, especially culture, to service quality evaluations by using a unique research setting. This research finds that ISQ evaluations and the important attributes indeed differ in Estonia and Taiwan and thus practitioners should focus on those factors and attributes that are important in their respective country to be more efficient in improving ISQ. However, ISQ factor Shared Understanding is found to be important in predicting overall quality evaluations in both Estonia and Taiwan. Another important finding is that all ISQ factors are significantly influenced by at least one of Hofstede’s culture dimensions, while six out of seven Hofstede’s culture dimensions are found to significantly influence ISQ evaluations. However, overall the influence of culture on ISQ evaluations is weak. Practitioners also benefit from the finding that the more services received online, the better ISQ is evaluated in Taiwan, while ISQ evaluations in Estonia are not influenced, indicating that more services should be provided online in Taiwan to improve ISQ evaluations. More research investigating the effect the amount of online services has on ISQ evaluations and on its moderating factors (such as culture) is called for.