Developing service climate in local vs. foreign firms in smaller Asian emerging markets: a resource-based and social exchange perspective

Abstract

While research on drivers of service climate has focused on organisational resources and human resource practices such as training, employee autonomy and inter-departmental support, how these resources interrelate and influence service climate has not been examined, especially in the context of smaller Asian emerging market. Drawing on the resource-based view and its extension on dynamic capability, and social exchange theory, this qualitative study investigates how local and foreign firms in smaller Asian emerging markets create a favourable service climate. Our findings suggest three inter-related groups of factors that influence service climate, namely firm-based, market-based and culture-based drivers. Notably, foreign service firms perform better than their local counterparts in several firm-based drivers (e.g. service-oriented human resource management practices, work facilitation resources). Our study proposes a conceptual framework that integrates inter-relationships of organisational resource-based factors and explains how internal and external factors drive service climate in firms in smaller Asian emerging markets.

Keywords:

• Drivers
• organisational resources
• resource-based view
• service climate
• service firms
• smaller Asian emerging markets
• social exchange theory

Ackowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor, Professor Maike Andresen and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and invaluable comments and feedback. In addition, we would like to thank Dr Peter Phillips-Rees and Dr Brett Scholz for proof-reading our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.