Importance-performance Analysis Grid Research Articles

Applying Importance-Performance Analysis for Improving Internal Marketing of Hospital Management in Taiwan

Importance-performance analysis enables management to evaluate and identify the major strengths and weaknesses of a hospital’s key success factors. The author attempts to understand employee expectations and perceptions of hospital internal-marketing and shows the usefulness of the Importance-performance analysis grid in evaluating hospital internal-marketing benefits from employee perspectives in Taiwan. The author identified a list of 18 items from the internal-marketing literature reviews, and each item was rated using a 5-point Likert scale. Responses were obtained from 257 usable questionnaires. The importance-performance grid shows that 4 items fall into the “Keep up the good work” quadrant, 5 items fall into the “Concentrate here” quadrant, 4 items fall into the “Low priority” quadrant, and 5 items fall into the “Possible overkill” quadrant. The findings suggest that an internal-marketing orientation is necessary to better match organizational characteristics and enhance service quality. The results are useful in identifying areas for strategic focus to help hospital managers develop internal-marketing strategies.

Selection of Outbound Package Tours: The Case of Senior Citizens in Hong Kong

Strong evidence points to an increasing number of senior citizens in the outbound travel market in Hong Kong. However, only a limited number of travel agencies in Hong Kong have paid attention to this potential market. This research investigates Hong Kong senior citizens' perceptions of the importance of the criteria used to select from the outbound package tours currently offered in the market and of the performance of these attributes. Importance–performance analysis (IPA) was carried out to analyze the data collected and categorize them into the four quadrants of the IPA grid. The results indicate the high mobility of senior citizens in Hong Kong and that they tend to join outbound package tours when traveling abroad. With regard to the provision of outbound package tours, they are generally satisfied with the performance of existing travel agencies, although some areas for improvement are noted. The findings also lend support to the high potential that exists in the senior citizen travel market and to the need for travel agencies to put extra effort into this niche market. Building upon previous literatures focusing only on selection criteria of group package tours, our study contributes further to the body of knowledge on seniors' travel decision making and the perception gap between them and the service providers. Recommendations to travel agencies regarding how to capture this market segment more effectively are also offered.

대학급식소 서비스 품질 속성에 대한 IPA 분석 - 대전지역 남학생과 여학생 비교

The purposes of this study were to investigate students' perception on importance and performance of service quality of university foodservice, and to examine Importance-Performance Analysis(IPA) of foodservice quality for male and female students. A total of 500 university students in Daejeon were surveyed and 432 responses were returned. Excluding responses with significant missing data, 412 responses were used for data analysis. In terms of importance of service quality attributes, 'sanitation(4.74)' category received the highest score, followed by 'food(4.36)', 'service(4.22)', 'convenience(4.01)', 'menu(3.90)' and 'atmosphere(3.73)'. In terms of performance, the highest service quality attribute was associated with 'convenience(3.30)', followed by 'service(3.06)', 'sanitation(2.95)', 'food(2.88)', 'atmosphere(2.79)' and 'menu(2.68)'. As the results of IPA, 'staff's kindness', 'overall quality of service', 'taste of the food', 'freshness of the food', 'overall quality of the food', and 'cleanliness of the facility' fell into the Quadrant IV(Focus here) for female students. On the other hand, male students' IPA grid illustrated that 'taste of the food', 'freshness of the food', 'nutrition of the food', 'sanitation of the food', and 'sanitation of the utensils' fell into Quadrant IV(Focus here).

A Revised Importance–Performance Analysis for Assessing Image: The Case of Cultural Tourism in Britain

Destination image is critical to the success of any destination, particularly because of how it affects the level of satisfaction with the tourist experience. Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA) and its revision were selected for destination positioning analysis in this study. The first aim of this article is to extend the traditional IPA approach and provided an option for destination positioning analysis. The measurement of image related to cultural tourism has received little attention in the tourism literature. Consequently, in this exploratory research, the first step is to conceptualize cultural tourism and determine the main attributes involved in its image measurement. Then, the scale developed was tested in an empirical manner. A questionnaire was used to examine the importance of 19 destination attributes for Taiwanese tourists who visited Britain's cultural tourism attractions and to determine how they rated Britain's performance with respect to these attributes postvisitation. This information was subsequently incorporated into the traditional and revised IPA grids. Then implications for destination positioning were provided by classifying the image attributes into factors so that the British destination management organizations can make better decisions about how to improve the perceived image. The result confirms the importance of tangible and Britain-specific cultural assets, such as authentic sights, historic architecture, museums and galleries, literary and artistic sites, as well as British customs and way of life. They can be pull factors for tourists looking to do something quintessentially British. However, adequate resources have to be allocated to improve the welcome, gastronomy, as well as the expense of visiting Britain, not only because they are the major weaknesses but also because tourists regard them as prerequisites. Moreover, attributes such as festivals/events and lively atmosphere can delight the tourists and strongly enhance overall satisfaction.

An Importance-Performance Analysis of Primary Health Care Services: Managers vs. Patients Perceptions

Using importance-performance analysis (IPA), this paper examines the perceptions of patients and managers of health centres of several health care quality services attributes. IPA is an approach to the measurement of customer/user satisfaction which allows for a simple and functional identification of both the strong and the weak aspects, or improvement areas, of a given service. Taking both the importance assigned by users to all relevant aspects of a given service and the perceived performance of the establishment in providing the service, the result is an IPA grid with four quadrants. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this methodology has been used to compare the perceptions of health centre patients and managers. The results showed patients and managers to have very different perceptions of all the quality service attributes. Implications for researchers and health centre managers are discussed. The study illustrates the usefulness of the IPA model as a managerial tool in identifying areas to which marketing resources should be allocated in order to improve and enhance the quality of the health centre services provided.

Importance values for Importance–Performance Analysis: A formula for spreading out values derived from preference rankings

Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA) is a simple and useful technique for identifying those attributes of a product or service that are most in need of improvement or that are candidates for possible cost-saving conditions without significant detriment to overall quality. To this end, a two-dimensional IPA grid displayed the results of the evaluation about importance and performance of each relevant attribute. This paper shows that ordinal preferences are better than metric measures of the importance dimension and proposes a formula to transform the ordinal measure into a new metric scale adapted to the IPA grid. This formula makes allowances for the total number of features considered, the number of rankings, and the reported orders of preference.

Ireland’s Image as a Tourism Destination in France: Attribute Importance and Performance

Ireland is highly dependent on tourism as an employment and revenue generator. Recent trends, however, suggest that visitors from France, one of Ireland’s key source markets, may have peaked. Tourism images are critical to the success of any destination, particularly because of how they affect the level of satisfaction with the tourist experience. Ireland is frequently acknowledged as a successfully branded and marketed tourism destination. Nonetheless, few image studies to date have focused specifically on Ireland, and none has analyzed the image of Ireland as a tourism destination in France. The aim of this study, therefore, was to redress this knowledge deficit. A questionnaire was used to examine the importance of certain destination attributes for French tourists and to determine how French visitors rate Ireland’s performance with respect to these attributes pre- and postvisitation. This information was subsequently incorporated into an importance-performance analysis grid.

Tourism destination competitiveness: a quantitative approach

Recently, researchers have suggested an approach to tourism destination competitiveness that goes beyond conventional destination attributes to include, in addition, generic business factors of competitiveness. Despite its apparent promise, there appears to have been little applied research building on this combined approach. This paper is designed to address this gap. Factors pertaining to the competitiveness of both the destination's attractions and its tourism industry were used to construct an instrument that was used to survey tourism practitioners in Hong Kong. Respondents were asked to rate the factors for both importance and relative competitiveness, in a method consistent with importance performance analysis (IPA). The results were analysed and discussed by reference to the IPA Grid. The paper concludes that the study has developed a promising research methodology that offers a quantitative, theoretically informed empirical analysis that will be able to provide a basis for managerial and policy decisions in the tourism industry.

An Extended Application of Importance-Performance Analysis

This study, an application of Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) to local Mexican restaurants, shows how the original IPA can be extended to identify the strengths and weaknesses of individual restaurants in a competitive target marketplace. A survey was conducted with customers at two restaurants during a seven-day period. Results indicated that an extended IPA framework, which yielded six different market positions, provided an advantage over the original IPA method in that it analyzed and presented various market positions of the target restaurant and its competitors on the same IPA grid. Suggestions and implications of the extended IPA are developed for restaurant managers.

An importance-performance analysis of hotel selection factors in the Hong Kong hotel industry: a comparison of business and leisure travellers

Using an Importance–Performance Analysis (IPA), this paper examined business and leisure travellers’ perceived importance and performance of six hotel selection factors in the Hong Kong hotel industry. The six hotel selection factors identified were: Service Quality, Business Facilities, Value, Room and Front Desk, Food and Recreation, and Security. Both business and leisure travellers held the same perceptions towards all the six hotel selection factors. The IPA grids illustrated that the Value factor fell into the Concentrate Here quadrant; Service Quality, Room and Front Desk and Security in the Keep Up the Good Work quadrant; and Business Facilities and Food and Recreation in the Low Priority quadrant. Room and Front Desk and Security were found to be the determining factors for business and leisure travellers, respectively, in their hotel choice selection. Implications for Hong Kong hoteliers and researchers were discussed.

Assessment of University Foodservice Employee Job Satisfaction and Strategy Formulation for Managerial Practitioners

ABSTRACT The facets of job satisfaction and their perceived importance to college and university foodservice employees (n = 194) were assessed. The survey instrument consisted of three parts: the Job Satisfaction Survey (Spector, 1985) was used to measure facets of job satisfaction and the level of total satisfaction; perceived importance questions for the corresponding job facets; and demographic items. The respondents rated the subscales “nature of work” and “supervision” the highest and the subscales “pay” and “promotion” the lowest. The results of facet satisfaction scores and corresponding perceived importance scores were then paired to be plotted on the Importance-Performance Analysis Grid (Martilla & James, 1977) to provide a strategy for foodservice managers to counteract employee dissatisfaction.