"IT Service Climate," by Ronnie Jia and Blaize Horner Reich

Ronnie Jia and Blaize Horner Reich. "IT Service Climate: An Essential Managerial Tool to Improve Client Satisfaction with IT Service Quality." Information Systems Management 28:2 (2011): 174-179.

Authors Jia and Reich take an interesting approach to service quality assessment. Making the point that the climate of an organization can affect the quality of services that are offered to customers, they take it one step further and maintain that an organization's internal climate can predict customers' perceptions of quality service. To investigate this further, they developed a 10 question instrument that can be used to assess the internal organizational climate. Their study showed that "service climate may be much more important than technical competence from the clients' point of view" (p. 174).

The authors begin by defining IT service climate as "shared perceptions of the practices and behaviors in their workplace that support the provision of IT service to business customers" (p. 174). They differentiate between climate and culture, which is described as deeper and based on core values and assumptions. Climate is more about perceptions and is an expression of culture.

The authors identify three dimensions to the IT service climate: service leadership, service vision, and service evaluation. Service leadership is about setting and communicating service goals. Service vision is about IT employees seeing themselves as having a role in meeting customer needs. Service evaluation is about evaluating employees on how they met their customer service goals. Of the three, the authors identify service leadership as being the most important.

The authors' research consisted of asking IT staff in four organizations 10 questions, and comparing their responses to the responses of their respective customers to the IT-SERVQUAL instrument. They found that, in fact, the impressions of IT staff about their own climate correlated with the impressions of their customers about quality of service. This relationship indicates that managers who work to positively affect climate will have the result of improving costomer perceptions about service quality. This can be very empowering for managers who can take action to improve the bottom line.

The authors recommend incorporating their 10 questions into internal employee satisfaction surveys, examining the findings carefully, and deploying the survey on a regular basis.

I found this to be an interesting look at how an organization's climate can affect and predict the perceptions of customers. While my own research is less about climate and more about the services we provide to each other as internal service providers and customers, it's clear that our service vision is affected by climate. Although this article was specifically about IT services, the lessons learned could be applied to other types of services. The concepts of service leadership, service vision, and service evaluation are things we can all apply in our daily work.