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In recent years, speedy development of Taiwan’s hotel industry intensifies market competition, customers’ demands on hotel services quality also increase with the increase of their consumption consciousness, and their demands on hotel types diversify, therefore hotel industry should concern on their unique management services quality brought by their different hotel types. The current designed service system or service transmission process may fail to meet customers’ demands owing to emphasizing degree gap in service quality. What is worse, it is difficult for hotel industry to actualize complete customer segregation and to provide customized services, therefore comprehensive understanding of customers’ demands on the service quality of different types hotels would contribute to operating management improvement of Taiwan hotel industry. This paper divides Taiwan hotels into three types: international tourism commercial type, holiday type and motel, the general hotels. It studies the emphasize degree gap in service quality between the industry and the customers. Data analysis shows that service quality gap (perceived gap) of hotels of different types exists in several quality aspects; what’s more, the perceived gaps, service quality aspects, and its items of different types of hotel are also different. After an integrated analysis, this paper puts forward a general and customer‐oriented quality item suitable for hotel industry to shorten the perceived gap of service quality, so that the hotel industry could design a service system and service transfer system, which could meet most lodging customers’ demands in the context of pluralized customer sources.

Soft total quality management (TQM) aspects are the facets of TQM that mainly concern with the management of human resource in a way to achieve the results of employees' job satisfaction. Based on this approach, the objective of this research is to examine the relationship between the most popular five soft TQM aspects and employees' job satisfaction in “ISO 9001” certified Sudanese oil companies.

Data were collected through questionnaires from employees across a total of five Sudanese oil companies owned by the government, and adopting an ISO-9001 quality program. The total population of the study consists of 1,505 permanent employees, while the sample size was 253 employees, determined by adopting a stratified random sampling technique. The multiple regression model was adopted for data analysis.

The results showed that the construct of soft TQM aspects including “top management commitment”, “employee empowerment”, “teamwork”, “training and education” and “employee involvement” explain 74% in the variance of employees' job satisfaction. Results showed positive association between soft TQM aspects and employees' job satisfaction at the 5% significance level. It was also found that each individual variable of the five soft TQM aspects has a significant positive association with employees' job satisfaction. Meanwhile, the results indicated that the most important soft TQM aspect in explaining the variability of employees' job satisfaction was the “employee empowerment” with the highest correlation coefficient (β) of (0.189).

The study recommends that in order to achieve their primary goal of employees' satisfaction, HR practitioners within organizations adopting total quality programs should align their practice in such a way to enhance soft aspects of TQM. Policy makers and top management in order to gain long-term infrastructural benefits obtained from employees' job satisfaction should show a visible support to TQM programs and allocate necessary resources to train their staff in the quality management system that enhance their empowerment and involvement. The study also recommends that since soft aspects of TQM raise their job satisfaction, employees should support and conform to quality management systems within their organizations.

The paper focuses on soft TQM aspects’ practical implementation. The findings make a significant contribution by using ISO-certified governmental Sudanese oil companies and tested the hypothesized model entails the impact of soft TQM implementation and employees' job satisfaction.

The aim of the study is to investigate the effects of perceived healthcare service quality (human aspects, technical aspects and tangible aspects) on satisfaction and guest loyalty in the hotel industry in the COVID-19 pandemic era.

A total of 130 guests in the hotel were selected purposively in Iraq. Data from self-administered questionnaires were analyzed through the VB-SEM statistical technique using Smart-PLS software towards testing the hypotheses.

The findings indicated that perceived service quality influences satisfaction and guest loyalty of guests in the hotel. This study reveals that human aspects, technical aspects and tangible aspects directly positively affect satisfaction and guest loyalty in the hotel industry.

This study highlights that perceived service quality (human aspects, technical aspects and tangible aspects) are vital and practical strategic tools that could be positioned to accelerate guest loyalty in the hotel industry. Furthermore, satisfaction mediates the relationship between human aspects, technical aspects, tangible aspects and guest loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to explore faculty's perceptions of quality management activities (QMA) within their departments, attention being paid to relevant quality aspects and whether quality management contributes to control or improvement of higher education. Furthermore, it examines differences between departments and relationships between the different variables.

A questionnaire containing items with Likert‐type answer scales was distributed to faculty (n=266) of 18 departments of universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands: 16 items dealt with QMA, 17 with attention paid to relevant quality aspects and ten with the perceived effects.

Faculty were neutral about the degree to which sufficient QMA were conducted within their departments. They were positive about the attention paid to relevant quality aspects. Furthermore, they were positive about the effects in terms of improvement and negative about the effects in terms of control. Significant differences were found between departments. Finally, positive correlations were found between management activities, attention being paid to quality aspects and the perceived effect in terms of improvement.

The main limitation of this study is that only faculty's perceptions were measured, thus it is not clear whether these QMA really result in improvement in educational practice.

Departments paying little attention to quality aspects and with few QMA could really benefit from further increasing their quality management efforts.

Quality management is often seen as mainly contributing to control and managerialism. This study demonstrates that according to faculty, quality management is influencing improvement positively.

The aim of this research is to provide insights into quality in a business‐to‐business relationship setting. The objectives are to review related relationship quality studies, to put forward first a definition and then a model of perceived business‐to‐business relationship quality, and afterwards to illustrate and deepen this model with empirical data from a typical business‐to‐business relationship.

The whole study rests on accumulated theoretical insights from service management combined with IMP literature which have been used together with empirical findings in an abductive manner to expand the scope on quality to encompass dyadic quality perceptions in a business relationship setting.

The definition and model do not so much depend on completely new elements, but instead the contribution lies in the way that current insights and empirical data have been combined into a conceptually dense and comprehensive entirety. Focusing on the process character of a relationship and the content of quality perceptions in a relationship, several new conceptualisations are developed and illustrated with empirical data. These are: unit and span of perceptions; comparison standards; variation in interactions; technical, social, and economic quality dimensions; process and outcome quality domains; four different hierarchical levels for categorising business interactions; and a dyadic analysis of perceived relationship quality.

The proposed definition and model were developed for analysing typical ongoing business‐to‐business relationships.

The study offers a tool for analysing and improving relationships, setting priorities in quality improvements, and selecting counterparts.

This is the first published study that expands the scope on quality, embracing interactions in the whole business relationship and two companies' perceptions of their relationship.

In this article a model is presented concerning the organisation of the maintenance process of a quality system. This model consists of the composition of two existing models. The point of departure is a three‐level model of quality management. Then each of these three levels has been split up into two components called “system‐structural” and “social‐structural”. After introducing several maintenance concepts on a conceptual level, these concepts are applied to each of these levels and components.

The objective of this paper is to investigate how webmasters within government bodies explain quality of websites. Despite the central position for advancing the communication, bridging usability tests and design, there are surprisingly few studies on how webmasters perceive, experience and explain website quality or design issues.

The authors' unit of analysis is webmasters from Norwegian web‐award‐winning organizations. Eight webmasters from four types of websites were interviewed. The websites were purposefully sampled, using the strategy of maximal variation sampling to maximize difference between the four types of websites.

The findings reveal that issues concerning usability are found to be an important dimension of website quality. The authors' analysis of how webmasters explain website quality reveals substantial variance in explanation of website quality. Repeated keywords of website quality are mainly related to user‐friendliness, effective website usage, content‐related issues and accessibility (WAI‐principles).

This study includes webmasters from award‐winning websites. In upcoming research contributions, it would add to the richness of the study if webmasters from non‐award‐winning websites were included. Measurement of website quality and success is widely addressed within the research literature. This paper offers the opportunity to understand how practitioners (i.e. webmasters) facilitate for website quality, grounded in their perception and explanations of which quality aspects they found to be of importance.

The website quality aspects identified in this paper can be used as insights for how to develop and improve the quality of websites with the public sector.

The overall digital enabled transformation of government appears to be guided by a rather heterogeneous set of quality standards. While a variance of quality standards might stimulate innovation in websites, it can also lead to a substantial difference in digital services provided to citizens. Thus, the authors' research stimulates the awareness of diversity of quality parameters and could have as an implication that national and international standards beyond accessibility standards are more explicitly shared and debated.

The aim of this paper is to provide insights into website practitioners' (i.e. webmasters') perception and explanation of quality aspects in websites. Webmasters are important contributors to the quality of available websites, and it is of particular benefit to learn about their suggestions. Most studies tackle perception of website quality from a user's point of view, while the added knowledge in this paper is the webmaster's explanation.

This study assessed the technical (tangible) and functional (human interaction) quality of services in a first‐class international health resort and related these to service management effectiveness. Service management is effective when customers judge the overall service quality to be good, they are highly satisfied, they are willing to recommend the firm to others and they intend to re‐purchase or are predisposed to purchase additional services from the firm. The technical and functional aspects of services quality and their relation to service management effectiveness, were found to be different between the core and supplementary services, between customers and service personnel and between customers with and without experience. The results support the statement that competitive advantage in this industry can be obtained by improving the functional aspects of services management, by better performance of supplementary services and by reducing the gap in perceptions between customers and contact personnel.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the key “hard” and “soft” quality management factors used by Australian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and their association with organisational performance.

A survey questionnaire was constructed for this research using Powell's quality management framework. The respondents were required to indicate their degree of implementation of quality management practices and to rate their TQM performance in relation to overall performance, return on assets, market share and customer satisfaction.

The study found that improved overall performance appears to be favourably influenced by a combination of “hard” TQM factors such as benchmarking and quality measurement, continuous improvement, and efficiency improvement; and the “soft” TQM factors consisting of top management philosophy and supplier support, employee training and increased interaction with employees and customers. Furthermore, the TQM factors of employee training, efficiency improvement, and employee and customer involvement would appear to be important in maintaining customer satisfaction, whilst employee and customer involvement also appeared to be important in maintaining a competitive edge in terms of return on assets.

The findings show that it is necessary to focus on a combination of soft or behavioural aspects and the hard “systems‐oriented” aspects of QM to achieve an improvement in overall performance, and that to maintain customer satisfaction and return on assets it is just as important to focus on employee involvement and training, as it is to have a customer focus.

This study examines qualitative and quantitative differences between service expectations and perceived performance in the foodservice industry, using the profile accumulation technique. Parallel series of data were obtained for service performance perceptions from actual customers at two pizza restaurants. The three sets of data were compared qualitatively and quantitatively. Results showed that customers structured their perceptions of the service into a common set of elements (termed aspects) and attached quality attributes to each of these elements. The three data series exhibited very similar dimensionalities in terms of both aspects and attributes of the service. Attributes were identified as satisfiers or dissatisfiers. In order to gain insight about their structure they were separately recoded using four different authors’ lists of quality dimensions. The significance of their quantitative differences for positive and negative disconfirmation was also examined. Aspects and attributes were used to calculate matrices of quality metrics referring to both the “aspects” dimensions provided by respondents and the dimension lists of the four authors. The work demonstrates that it is possible to obtain and analyse customers’ expectations and perceptions without making pre‐assumptions about them, and will therefore be of interest to managers and marketers of restaurants and other services.