THE IMPACT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE ON INTERNAL SERVICE QUALITY

Organizational culture has been a long-standing area of research in more traditional business management research, however to-date few, if any, studies have attempted to consider how employees are servicing each other within an organization''s own cultural environment. In an innovative attempt to link organizational culture (OC) to internal service quality (ISQ), this work develops a case study of three hotels in Malaysia based on in-depth interviews and a semi-quantitative technique, Profile Accumulation Technique (PAT). Ogbonna and Harris'' (2002) framework is used to demonstrate how and where organizational culture can affect employees'' ISQ performance. The concept of ISQ in hotel is based on Caruana and Pitt (1997, Paraskevas (2001) and White and Rundall (1999) but a free response PAT by Johns and Lee-Ross (1995) was used in examining the ISQ. The study found the weak linkages between OC and ISQ and the evidence suggests that different types of OC have different levels of impact on the employee ISQ. The initial understanding of the link between OC and ISQ may benefit managers in the industry through benchmarking some of the positive practices.