Employees' National Culture and Service Quality: An Integrative Review

Because of the interactive role employees play in service operations, their behaviors often affect the customer’s experience directly. Employee behaviors, in turn, are often a function of the culture in which they are born and raised. To that end, it is critical to develop a national culture theory for service firms that need to operate in an increasingly global business environment and to study the extent of the impact of employees’ national culture on a service firm’s quality outcomes. Our review of the literature aims to increase the understanding of such links. We trace the impact of major cultural characteristics (adopted from the work of Geert Hofstede and the GLOBE project) on three dimensions of service operations: physical surroundings and products, employee behavioral aspects, and service supply chain operations. We also study the extent to which these relationships change in different segments of the same market. We develop a research framework, offer testable propositions for additional research, and identify future research directions to advance the field on these matters.