Abstract

Much of past research provided support for the positive relationship between organizational service climate and customer perceptions of service quality (e.g. Schneider, Parkington, and Buxton, 1980; Schneider and Bowen, 1985; Schneider and Bowen, 1993; Schneider, White, and Paul, 1998). That is, service organization can manage and enhance their internal climate for service in order to increase the possibility of positive service quality evaluations by customers. However, past research failed to clearly explain why this relationship holds. Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1985) viewed appropriate expressions of emotion on the part of employees as one of the key determinants of service quality. Thus, we proposed that employee displayed positive emotions may be a mediating variable between organizational service climate and customer perceptions of service quality. Data was collected form 236 sales clerks in 102 retail shoe stores in Northern Taiwan and 232 customers who were served by one of the sales clerks. Results of LISREL suggested that the proposed theoretical model fitted the data well, indicating a support of the hypotheses. It seems that organizational service climate influences employees displayed positive emotions which in turn, influences customer evaluation of service quality.