Supervision as a consumer service for the public employee: Ethical supervision using service marketing considerations in a theory of management for quality

Grounded in W. Edwards Deming's theory of management for quality, this research explores the idea that employee supervision may be viewed as a consumer service provided the employee by the employee's immediate supervisor. The idea of immediate supervision performed as a consumer service is applied specifically to public sector employees.; Support for the idea is drawn from human resource management, ethics, and service marketing concepts. The primary research develops document, informant, and survey evidence. The employee survey is an experimental approach to assessing anonymously the quality of supervision received by the employee. In this experimental approach, supervision is viewed as an organization-wide service received by the employee through the employee's immediate supervisor.; The vocabulary and assessment scales used in the survey to define the quality of immediate supervision are taken from terminology and scales used to quantify service quality in consumer service quality assessment. In brief, the quality of a specific consumer service may be assessed by quantifying and comparing consumer perceptions with consumer expectations about the service on several dimensions of service quality. Six-point Likert-type scales are used in this study to effect the quantifications. The score or gap assessment, from each perception-expectation comparison, may be interpreted as representative of the strength or weakness ascribed to the quality of the service, on that particular service quality dimension, by the consumers completing the assessment.; The results from this study of immediate supervision, assessed as a quality consumer service, are consistent in general with the results from other consumer service quality assessments performed in the same manner. For example, just as with consumer expectations of service quality, employee expectations of supervision quality are high across all dimensions of service quality. Information from the assembled concepts and evidence suggests that ethical means as well as ethical ends together should serve as the declared foundation, in public sector organizations, for tailoring immediate supervision to the consumer service quality perceptions and expectations of individual employees.