| Service quality plays an essential role in customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer loyalty, and profits (Cronin & Taylor, 1992; Schneider & Bowen, 1995). Previous research studies have examined factors that influence external customers' perceived service quality in various fields (Carman, 1990; Cronin & Taylor, 1992; Finn & Lamb, 1991; Mangold & Babakus, 1991), but relatively few studies have focused on which factors influence employees' service behavior and how employees perceive the way service provided by co-workers affects their own service delivery (e.g., Bitner, Booms, & Mohr, 1994).;This study examines six factors that influence employees' internal service quality level in a public sport organization in China through testing six hypotheses. The six factors are organizational learning culture, job satisfaction, motivation to learn, affective organizational commitment, continuance organizational commitment, and normative organizational commitment. A total of 370 questionnaires were distributed to employees in the State Sport General Administration of China (SSGAC). Two hundred and ninety-eight were returned, of which 6 were discarded because of missing data. Therefore, the number of usable questionnaires was 292 and the response rate was 80.5%.;Correlation analysis indicated that five of the six hypotheses were supported. Hypothesis five, in which there is a negative relationship between continuance organizational commitment and internal service quality, was rejected. Hierarchical research analysis showed that motivation to learn (beta = .47, partial r = .52, part r = .34, t(267) = 9.87, p < .01) and organizational learning culture (beta = .33, partial r = .37, part r = .23, t(267) = 6.52, p < .05) played significant roles in predicting the dependent variable, internal service quality compared with other independent variables. Motivation to learn uniquely explained 12% and organizational learning culture uniquely explained 5% of the variance of internal service quality when the effects of the other independent variables were removed. This study has implications for human resource managers and advances the knowledge base of internal service quality in the field of sport management. |
