Culture of excellence and its influence on internal service quality, employee satisfaction and loyalty in public universities / Nasriman Abdul Rahman

Ministry of Education Malaysia is strongly encouraged the institution of higher learning such as public universities (PUs) to offer excellent quality service to its internal and external customers. This is quite a challenge to most of PU and in order to achieve this objective, the organizations need to know and understand the elements that trigger to this excellence. There is no doubt that employees play an important role in providing the best quality of work. Ideally, if all these can be achieved, it will ensure a high productivity to the organization and at the same time it will optimize the employees’ satisfaction and loyalty. Consistently outstanding work performance coupled with the right attitudes among employees help to transform the norm into a culture of excellence (CoE). Good co-ordination and relationship among the management teams and employees will help to improve the employee satisfaction and loyalty. Employees are regarded as the internal customers. Hence, the employee-perceived the internal service quality (ISQ) which can be instrumental to motivate the employees to perform better. This research aims to help the management teams of the public universities to cultivate and sustain the CoE for institutional excellence. The variables in this research were defined and operationalized accordingly. The dimensions and items of the variables were derived from the related literature and focus group interviews. Structured questionnaire was then designed. CoE consisted of eight (8) dimensions and 71 items, relevant for the public universities. This research developed the structural model to analyse the various relationships between the CoE, ISQ, employee satisfaction and loyalty. Critical factors of CoE were quantitatively determined using data obtained from employees of PUs throughout Malaysia. The measurement and relationship analyses were performed using SmartPLS modelling. Empirical findings suggested eight (8) dimensions of the CoE and the causal relationships among the CoE, ISQ, employee satisfaction and loyalty were found to be positive. Several implications and recommendations were discussed and proposed for the kind applications of the public universities.