Which HRM practices contribute to service culture?

It is known that HRM can help to develop service culture, which will in turn improve service quality. The purpose of this article is to determine the relative importance of six HRM practices in terms of their impact on culture. A questionnaire survey of medium and large sized UK service businesses was conducted. The results reveal that there is a strong association between culture and the HRM practices, and that some management practices are more strongly associated with culture than others. Further research should explore the reasons why some HRM practices are more contributory to culture than others. Service businesses in pursuit of service quality should make use of these HRM practices for developing service culture in their organisations. This research has confirmed a strong association between culture and HRM practices, and also clarified the relative importance of the HRM practices in terms of their impact on culture in order to improve service quality.

This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Total Quality Management & Business Excellence. Citation: Ueno, A (2012) Which HRM practices contribute to service culture?, Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 23:11-12, 1227-1239, DOI: 10.1080/14783363.2012.733255. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited