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Postulates that the use of some key ideas from statistical control thinking can improve service quality. Explores the identification and analysis of gaps in perceptual differences between service customers and service providers as a way of adopting a statistical control philosophy in a service environment. Argues that such a method provides excellent information for creating a true customer‐centred approach to service delivery, being practical, simple in operation and useful for both immediate and long‐term strategic impact.

This paper aims to examine the level of internal market orientation (IMO) in Indian banking as seen from the perspective of internal customers and suppliers, particularly with regard to the three components of market orientation: intelligence generation, intelligence dissemination, and responsiveness.

The study is based on primary research conducted with data gathered from 611 internal customers and 37 internal suppliers of an Indian private sector bank.

The results indicate that all the three components of market orientation mentioned above determine the IMO level. Furthermore, the continuous emphasis on IMO by internal suppliers results in organizational commitment and job satisfaction among internal customers.

The study is limited to the three main dimensions of IMO: intelligence generation, intelligence dissemination, and responsiveness.

In order to ensure increased satisfaction of internal customers, internal suppliers have to give due cognizance to the three aspects of IMO as these influence the internal customers' commitment, loyalty and hence their retention.

The research findings should prove to be of immense help to bankers, academicians and policymakers. Bankers will be benefited to the extent of ensuring zero internal customer defection through the implementation of effective intelligence generation, intelligence dissemination and responsiveness to internal market needs. Policymakers can devote their energies and resources towards identifying the constraints that lead to lower internal customer satisfaction and accordingly formulate policies aimed at maximizing their satisfaction level, thereby enhancing both market and financial performance of an organization.

Companies often aspire to create advantages for their businesses through acquisitions. Their participation has increasingly been documented to include different motives for acquirers, while focusing less on the ambitions of acquired parties with the acquisitions. The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss gaps and the handling of gaps between acquirers and acquired parties in acquisitions of innovative firms.

In the paper, the authors specifically focus on acquisitions of innovative firms. Four case studies illustrate gaps between the acquirers and the acquired parties.

The authors conclude that gaps may be present from the start as latent gaps, and become activated in integration or as the consequence of non-integration decisions. Gaps between the acquirer and the acquired party may be further manifested in external parties’ reactions to the integration. The handling of gaps emphasizes a transition time and communication about expectations between the acquirer and the acquired party.

The paper contributes to previous research on mergers and acquisitions in general, and acquisitions of innovative firms in particular. Prior literature on acquisitions is scarce on descriptions of gaps or the handling of gaps. Gaps complement ideas on differences in culture between acquirers and acquired parties. It also highlights how acquired parties have as much intention with an acquisition as acquirers.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and understand the dynamics among perceptual gap of work environment between a supervisor and subordinates; personal psychological capital; self-directed behavior in a non-Western manufacturing work context.

This study investigated 288 dyadic relationships between supervisors and subordinates from 43 technical teams that came from six different large automotive part manufacturing companies in South Korea. Sobel test technique was mainly used to examine the effects of the perceptual difference of work environment.

The results indicated that the supervisor’s perceptual gap of work environment from subordinates had a negative association with their self-directed behavior, B = 0.233, SE = 0.103, p = 0.023. On the other hand, the negative effect of supervisor’s perceptual gap showed the competitive mediation effect through an indirect path to the positive psychological capital (PsyCap), Sobel B = 0.126, SE = 0.061, p = 0.037. This finding showed that providing a high level of autonomous work environment is not sufficient to get employees to show a high level of self-directed behavior if the perceptual gap is not well managed.

Adding to the existing research that studies self-directed behavior or proactive behavior in the Western high-tech or service work context, this study extended our understanding about the impact of the perceptual gap of work environment in the hierarchical and highly standardized non-Western manufacturing context.

This research explores the expectation gap between tax clients’ motivations to hire tax preparers versus tax preparers’ perceptions of those client motivations. The study builds on limited previous research by examining preparers primarily from local firms rather than focusing solely on large international firms. The Gaps Model of Service Quality provides the theoretical lens for the paper. We employ the recently developed Taxpayer Motivation Scale (TMS) to measure four client motivations to hire a preparer: (1) saving money, (2) saving time, (3) legal compliance, and (4) protection from the IRS. We measure expectation gaps for those four motivations using matched tax preparer–tax client dyads.

We employ statistical sub-group analyses to investigate the effects of both clients’ and preparers’ demographic characteristics that influence tax-expectation gaps. Results suggest client gender plays a noteworthy role in predicting many of the gaps. In addition, complexity of tax returns, children in the home, and client perceptions of tax-preparer advocacy help explain gaps. Finally, female preparers appear to be relatively more sensitive to client needs. We conclude that tax preparers need to (1) better understand their clients’ motivations for hiring them and (2) reexamine marketing efforts to educate clients about preparer credentials and potential strategy options for tax preparation.

It appears as if a gap exists between objective environmental conditions and the respective managerial perception of those conditions. This situation poses severe problems for executives deriving effective strategies and initiating successful organizational change. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop and provide a deeper understanding of the factors that lead to such a gap.

On the basis of the literature from psychology and strategic management, this paper develops a conceptual framework of the cognitive model with the perception process and potentially moderating factors. Furthermore, more precise mechanisms and relationships within the perception of environmental conditions are proposed.

The perception process consists of three stages, attention, encoding and storage/retrieval, which all may explain variations in how individuals interpret the environment. Moreover, dispositional factors (such as cognitive styles, cognitive structures, intelligence and motivation) as well as situational factors (such as emotion and stress) further cause variations between and within individuals, which ultimately leads to a gap between objective and perceived environmental conditions.

This study not only highlights the existence and the severe consequence of a misperception of environmental conditions, but also offers a variety of factors that could lead to this undesirable effect. Furthermore, while previous research has typically focused on single factors that might influence the perception process, this study assumes a holistic view on the cognitive model and provides more detailed and specific mechanisms on a perceptual gap.

The objective of this paper is to describe the teleological actions needed to assess and manage critical incidents that cause negative emotions in service encounters. Teleological actions are movements into the future that are believed to be move either towards a predictable/known or unpredictable/unknown state or condition. The authors distinguish between, define and apply three categories: transformative – ad hoc and present-based actions; formative – pre-determined and past-based actions; and rationalist – goal-directed and future-based actions.

A qualitative study, based upon a two-phase approach applying convenience and judgemental sampling, was used. Focussing on one teleological theory, a process of abductive matching was applied throughout the study. Abductive matching refers to recurring themes, patterns and categories that are uncovered through the iterative processes of analysis. The teleological framework structured and guided the data collection and empirical observations.

Seen through the perspective of teleological actions, the study enhances our understanding of the manner in which critical incidents generate negative emotions in service encounters. Through the same perspective, the investigation also reveals that the outcome of a negative service encounter depends upon the interactive interface between service provider and service receiver.

The teleological actions between service providers and service receivers in negative service encounters appear to be mediators between cause-and-effect on the one hand (critical incident and negative emotions) and a perceptual gap on the other (outcome of negative service encounter). The teleological perspective also provides numerous opportunities for further research in this area.

Managers should strive to understand the teleological actions potentially undertaken by service receivers, so that they can deal with the teleological actions of their front-line staff accordingly. The interactive interface between a service provider and a service receiver is crucial in assessing and managing critical incidents.

Based on teleological actions, the investigation provides both a valuable and complementary contribution on assessing and managing critical incidents and the negative emotions that are often triggered in the service-encounter interface between a service provider and a service receiver. Providers also need to educate their staff on what can occur and on how to react appropriately.

The purpose of this study is to capture patients' and employees' perception of quality of care in the Indian private hospitals and to find the possible perceptual gaps between both the groups.

Authors have referred to the Victorian patient satisfaction monitoring (VPSM) scale and studied the responses of 327 patients and 327 employees collected from six private Indian tertiary care hospitals. SPSS v26 software was used to conduct the data reliability test, descriptive analysis and Mann–Whitney U test.

Authors have found significant differences in perceptions of quality of care between the patients and employees in the Indian hospitals. Employees have high positive perceptions towards the provided medical care whereas the patients have less favourable perceptions for many quality indicators.

This study findings help the healthcare managers, practitioners and healthcare workers of the Indian hospitals to understand the perceptions of both the employees and the patients towards healthcare quality elements and help to reduce the existing perceptual gap in the process of providing quality healthcare services.

To the best of authors knowledge, this is one of the pioneering studies conducted in Indian healthcare industry to capture and compare the perceptions of both the employees' and the patients' perceptions of various quality of care elements. This study highlighted the existing perceptual gap between the employees and the patients on various healthcare quality elements and indicated the critical areas for improvement to provide high quality healthcare services.

This study aims to explore expectation gaps concerning the roles between educators and students in the context of venture creation courses at higher education institutions by investigating their mutual perspectives. The authors seek to answer the following research questions: (1) how is the role expectation toward the entrepreneurship education of teachers different from that of students and (2) what are the consequences of these expectation gaps in entrepreneurship education?

This study applies an explorative qualitative approach. As the research setting, the authors selected an entrepreneurship education course for advanced management students at a German public university. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with both educators and students to examine how role ambiguity emerges in venture creation courses.

This study identified discrepancies between educators and students in their fundamental assumptions regarding the role of educators and students. Such discrepancies are the autonomy-level assumption gap, capacity assumption gap and learning outcomes expectation gap. Based on the findings, this study develops a framework of expectation gaps between educators and students as sources for role ambiguity in entrepreneurship education by extending the role episode model developed in role theory.

The findings contribute to the extant literature on entrepreneurship education in several ways. First, this study reveals that students in venture creation programs can encounter role ambiguity due to differing expectations about their role between educators and students, which can negatively affect the students' perception of their learning outcome. Second, this study discovered that the possible discrepancies regarding the fundamental assumptions about the role of educators and students pose a challenge to educators. Third, the findings illuminate the importance of understanding the complex identity of students in the context of student-centered entrepreneurship education.

This study offers several practical implications for entrepreneurship educators in higher education institutions. First, this study reveals the confusion among students concerning their role in entrepreneurship education. As such, it is recommended that educators explain to students the purpose of the student-centered pedagogical approach and the expected role of students in acting as independent entrepreneurial agents. Second, while student-centered entrepreneurship education is based on the fundamental assumption that students are motivated to develop their own startup projects, educators must consider the nature of students' motivation and their overall student-life situation. Finally, this study demonstrates the importance of creating an active feedback loop so that entrepreneurship teachers can be aware of such perceptional gaps between educators and students and understand the sources of these gaps.

While the extant literature indicates the existence of perceptual gaps between educators and students in the context of entrepreneurship education, how these gaps emerge and influence the outcome of entrepreneurship education remained unclear. One critical reason for the under-investigation of this issue was that existing studies predominantly emphasize the educators' perspectives, although such expectation gaps can only emerge through the discrepant views of two different parties. This study tackled this research gap by considering the mutual perspective of educators and students by applying role theory.

The purpose of this chapter is to encourage investigation of management accounting (MA) service quality via comparisons of perceptions by service users and providers. Such comparisons are important in order to satisfy the needs of service users, assure good communications, justify the costs of MA, promote improved decision-making, and help improve the organizational standing of MA. We review literature from accounting, service marketing, and information systems, a common information service with similarities to accounting, to argue the case for conducting research on MA service quality.

The findings from our literature review show that research on service quality is seemingly important and abundant in many areas, but not concerning accounting. In essence, we don't know what perceptual differences exist between management accountants and their customers, why these differences might exist, or how organizations might identify and narrow identified gaps.

This chapter is among the first to call for research into perceived differences in MA service quality between users and providers. We argue for investigating sources of differences based on prior research in internal marketing and information systems. We offer a conceptual model that might be used as a basis in future investigations.