Abstract
The service sector over the last few decades has become a symbol of prosperity and growth in many economies around the world in terms of its contribution to GDP growth, employment and standard of living. Despite this, the perception among most economists that productivity of services lags behind manufacturing still persists. Several scholars have attributed this to the conceptual, empirical and practical problems of measuring productivity in services. In an attempt to address these problems, the systematic review of extant literature and existing scales and semi-structured interviews led to the development of a theoretically grounded model and multi-item scales for measuring service productivity and its related constructs. The data was collected from higher education academics using a questionnaire instrument and was analysed using exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling to empirically assess and validate the proposed service productivity model and to test the research hypotheses.The findings reveal that resource commitment positively and significantly influences employee readiness and customer readiness. In addition, resource commitment, employee readiness and customer readiness positively and significantly impact on service productivity. Finally, service productivity positively and significantly influences stakeholder satisfaction. Each of the relationships in the conceptual model was supported and resource commitment has the greatest impact on both employee and customer readiness. Overall, the results suggest that the antecedent determinants of service productivity are resource commitment, employee readiness and customer readiness and the consequential determinant of service productivity is stakeholder satisfaction.
Theoretically, this thesis advances our understanding of productivity measurement in services and contributes to its multidisciplinary theory building by establishing the determinants of service productivity and proposing and validating a conceptual model for measuring service productivity. Methodologically, this thesis contributes to the existing scales in marketing by developing new scales for measuring the researcher`s proposed constructs. Managerially, the proposed model and conceptual framework highlight the factors that service managers can employ in measuring, managing and improving productivity in their organisations
Date of Award | 2012 |
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Original language | English |
Awarding Institution |
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Supervisor | Harjit Sekhon (Supervisor), David Bailey (Supervisor) & Amanda Broderick (Supervisor) |