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The purpose of this paper is to examine the transformational leadership and service quality in the businesses active in the field of e-commerce with the mediating role of trust and team performance.

Survey questionnaires were administered on a 384-subject sample of the employees of the teams working in electronic businesses in Iran. The structural equation modeling and partial least square techniques were used to analyze the data.

The results showed that transformational leadership has a positive impact on service quality and improves team performance. The effect of transformational leadership on the interpersonal trust and the trust on the team performance are also positive and significant. In summary, the improved performance also has a positive impact on service quality.

The main limitation is the assessment by questionnaire because the questionnaires measure the attitudes of individuals, not the facts as they are, and the attitudes of individuals usually involve personal judgments and prejudices in the research. Also, examining the research model in different cultural domains may provide different results because of being influenced by different cultures. Hence, the authors recommend that the findings should be examined in other communities with different cultures.

Evaluating the impact of the transformational leadership on service quality (SERVPERF scale) by a survey of team trust and performance in e-business is an innovation in the influence assessment of these variables. The present research is considered applicable to the management science as new findings in organizational behavior studies and recognition of transformational leaders, as well as the positive impacts of the characteristics of them on individuals and followers.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers increasingly opt for, or are forced to, use home delivery services. The authors study retailers' decisions regarding “delivery mode”, which is about outsourcing (vs. insourcing) the delivery service to a traditional delivery company or an unbranded carrier and its effects on consumers' perceived overall quality, perceived hygienic quality, and subsequently, willingness to stay with the firm beyond the pandemic.

A pre-test, an experiment and a post-test were conducted with participants from the UK (Total N = 380).

The results of this study show that (1) in a pandemic, perceived hygienic quality overshadows perceived service quality as a key determinant of consumers' choices, and (2) while consumers have a relatively negative view of the hygienic level of unbranded carriers, they do not differentiate between traditional delivery carriers and retailer-branded carriers. Thus, they are equally interested in using the services of the latter ones.

This study shows that during a health crisis, consumers change their hierarchy of motivations to reflect the new protection motivations. The authors usher perceived hygienic quality as a variable that should be seriously considered as both a tactical and a strategic variable affecting the attractiveness of alternative home delivery methods and consumers' intentions to continue using them after the pandemic.

There have been numerous studies on measures of service quality, such as SERVQUAL and SERVPERF, in a variety of contexts, but the validity of these instruments in Asian markets is under‐researched. The present study was focused in South Korea and data on expectations, perceptions and importance measures were collected from 153 bank customers. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the measurement scales lacked validity with the South Korean sample, and principal component analyses revealed that SERVQUAL and SERVPERF were not uni‐dimensional. An amended SERVQUAL type scale showed three factors similar to the original SERVQUAL analysis, and an amended SERVPERF type scale showed two factors, with most of the original items converged on different conceptual dimensions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of five alternative measures of service quality in the high education sector – service quality (SERVQUAL), importance‐weighted SERVQUAL, service performance (SERVPERF), importance‐weighted SERVPERF, and higher education performance (HEdPERF).

Data were collected by means of a structured questionnaire containing perception items enhanced from the SERVPERF and HEdPERF scales and expectation items from the SERVQUAL scale, modified to fit into the higher education (HE) sector. The first draft of the questionnaire was subject to a pilot testing through a focus group and an expert evaluation. Data were gathered from a sample of 360 students of a Portuguese University in Lisbon. Scales were compared in terms of unidimensionality, reliability, validity and explained variance.

It can be concluded that SERVPERF and HEdPERF present the best measurement capability, but it is not possible to identify which one is the best.

Since the study only examined the measurement capabilities of the five instruments at a single faculty, the collection of more data in other institutions is required in order to provide more general results.

The current results do make available some important insights into how the five alternative instruments of service quality in an HE context compare with one another.

The paper attempts to develop insights into comparative evaluations of five measuring instruments of service quality in an HE setting.

This paper aims to test and compare the relative efficacy of three measuring instruments of service quality (namely Higher Education PERFormance (HEdPERF), SERVPERF and the moderating scale of HEdPERF‐SERVPERF) within a higher education setting. The objective was to determine which instrument had the superior measuring capability in terms of unidimensionality, reliability, validity and explained variance.

After a pilot test, data were collected from students in two public universities, one private university and three private colleges in Malaysia between January and March 2004, by the “contact person” route. From a total of 560 questionnaires, 381 were usable: a response rate of 68.0 per cent. This sample of nearly 400,000 students in Malaysian tertiary institutions was in line with the generalized scientific guideline for sample size decisions. Data were subjected to regression analysis.

A modified five‐factor structure of HEdPERF is put forward as the most appropriate scale for the higher education sector.

Since this study only examined the respective utilities of each instrument within a single industry, any suggestion that the HEdPERF is generally superior would still be premature. Nonetheless, the current findings do provide some important insights into how these instruments of service quality compare with one another.

The single dominant factor on this study is “access”, which has clear implications for institutions' marketing strategies.

This is believed to be the first study of its kind carried out among consumers of the higher education service.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test a new industry‐specific scale, HEdPERF (Higher Education PERFormance) to capture the authentic determinants of service quality within higher education sector.

The primary goal of this research was to test and compare the relative efficacy of HEdPERF against SERVPERF in order to determine which instrument had the superior measuring capability.

In terms of unidimensionality, reliability, and validity, HEdPERF explained variance within the higher education setting better in comparison to SERVPERF.

Since this study only examined the respective utilities of each instrument within a single industry, in only one national setting, any suggestion that the HEdPERF is generally superior would still be premature.

The current findings do provide some important insights into how the instruments of service quality compare with one another, in a typical higher education context.

An attempt is made in the paper, to develop critical insights into comparative evaluation of service quality measurement instruments.

Current measures of service quality do not effectively capture customers’ perceptions of service quality for different types of retail stores. Explores the usefulness of SERVPERF, the perceptions component of SERVQUAL and a retail service quality scale (the DTR scale) in measuring the service quality of different product‐service retail environments. Specifically, investigates the relative performance of two scales measuring the service quality of retailers where goods purchase is the primary focus, against another where both goods and services are equally important. Results showed that the DTR scale was superior within the context of a “more goods and less services” environment, i.e. a supermarket, while SERVPERF was better for a retailing context where the service element becomes more important, i.e. an electronic goods retailer. This modified scale measured the service quality of an electronic goods retailer more effectively than either the DTR scale or the SERVPERF. Implications for retailers are discussed

The purpose of this paper is to determine the best measure among several alternatives (SERVQUAL, weighted SERVQUAL, SERVPERF, weighted SERVPERF) and develop a scale which healthcare providers can use for measurement of healthcare service quality.

The study involved two phases. The first phase was through a series of in-depth interviews with experts and patients followed by a pilot study. Subsequently, the second phase involved a quantitative phase through surveys with 384 patients. Alternative measures were analyzed using coefficient (Cronbach) α, composite reliability, factor analysis and logistic regression analysis.

Findings confirmed “Weighted SERVPERF” using an interactive methodology as the most appropriate for measurement of healthcare service quality.

Using the model and scale developed, healthcare providers will be able to measure healthcare service quality and identify areas of shortfall and act accordingly to improve delivery through allocating resources in service areas that would generate the greatest returns in customer satisfaction. Enhancing satisfaction will ultimately generate patient loyalty and positive recommendation behavior.

The purpose is to investigate, the difference between SERVQUAL and SERVPERF's predictive validity of service quality.

Data from 17 studies containing 42 effect sizes of the relationships between SERVQUAL or SERVPERF with overall service quality (OSQ) are meta‐analyzed.

Overall, SERVQUAL and SERVPERF are equally valid predictors of OSQ. Adapting the SERVQUAL scale to the measurement context improves its predictive validity; conversely, the predictive validity of SERVPERF is not improved by context adjustments. In addition, measures of services quality gain predictive validity when used in: less individualistic cultures, non‐English speaking countries, and industries with an intermediate level of customization (hotels, rental cars, or banks).

No study, that were using non‐adapted scales were conducted outside of the USA making it impossible to disentangle the impact of scale adaptation vs contextual differences on the moderating effect of language and culture. More comparative studies on the usage of adapted vs non‐adapted scales outside the USA are needed before settling this issue meta‐analytically.

SERVQUAL scales require to be adapted to the study context more so than SERVPERF. Owing to their equivalent predictive validity the choice between SERVQUAL or SERVPERF should be dictated by diagnostic purpose (SERVQUAL) vs a shorter instrument (SERVPERF).

Because of the high statistical power of meta‐analysis, these findings could be considered as a major step toward ending the debate whether SERVPERF is superior to SERVQUAL as an indicator of OSQ.

The SERVPERF (for Service Performance) and the HEdPERF (for Higher Education Performance) are two questionnaires for collecting customer/student feedback on service quality that have been tested and used mainly in non‐Chinese contexts. The purpose of this paper is to adapt and initially validate a Chinese translation of these two instruments for application in the context of post‐secondary education in Hong Kong.

Given that a Chinese translation of the two questionnaires concerned has not been tested in this new response‐context, an exploratory approach was adopted by examining the psychometric properties of the SERVPERF scales and the HEdPERF scales via scale alpha, item‐correlation analysis and exploratory factor analysis using valid responses collected from 271 students.

The alpha values of both the SERVPERF scales and the HEdPERF scales are good or acceptable, with the latter better than the former in general. In the present study, the validity of employing the SERVPERF in the targeted response‐context is supported as all the five SERVERF dimensions have been cleanly identified in the exploratory factor analysis. However, only three out of the five HEdPERF dimensions were identified in the present study, and two of the identified dimensions are complex concepts with each of them exhibited as two factors in the exploratory factor analysis, casting doubt on the appropriateness of the direct employment of the HEdPERF in the targeted response‐context for the measurement of service quality.

The students who participated in the present study were pursuing Project Yi Jin, which was a special one‐year post‐secondary programme in Hong Kong.

Taking both reliability and validity issues into consideration, this initial investigation indicates that the SERVPERF may be a more appropriate instrument than the HEdPERF for supporting quality assurance in the context of Hong Kong post‐secondary education, especially when multiple questionnaires will be used for collecting students' feedback on their various experiences at different levels, where it is important for these questionnaires to be, as much as possible, simple and non‐overlapping.