The role of people training and development in delivering service quality in uk based thai restaurants

Oxford Brookes of Hospitality Management Oxford Brookes University THE ROLE OF PEOPLE TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT IN DELIVERING SERVICE QUALITY IN UK BASED THAI RESTAURANTS Trang Ngo Thi

Oxford Brookes of Hospitality Management

Oxford Brookes University

THE ROLE OF PEOPLE TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT IN DELIVERING SERVICE QUALITY IN UK BASED THAI RESTAURANTS

Trang Ngo Thi Quynh Academic Year 2014- 2015

This dissertation is submitted in part fulfilment of the requirements for the Master’s Degree in International Hotel and Tourism Management

DECLARATION

This dissertation is the result of my own independent work Where material other than

my own work has been used it is appropriately attributed and reference in the text

I agree that this dissertation may be made available for reference and photocopying at the discretion of the Head of School, who will only give permission for such reproduction

to the text which s/he considers fair and reasonable

Trang Ngo Thi Quynh

Page i


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation is a result of my Master journey at Oxford School of Hospitality Management I would like to send thanks to all lecturers and professors who are part of the School, for the passion and contribution for teaching and supporting students in their academic and professional experiences

I would like to thank Dr Judie Gannon for all her help and guidance throughout my project

A significant “thank you” to owners and managers in eight Thai restaurants I interviewed

for their supports during the time I did my research

Last, but not least, I spend my sincere thank for my family and my friends for their support throughout all these years of studies

Thank you very much

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Design/ method/ approach

Based on a choice of phenomenon philosophy, the researcher conducted a small- scale qualitative research with one observation and twelve interviews of owners and managers

in a sample of eight Thai restaurants As applying a purposive sample technique, the research carried out the study in chosen small and medium size Thai restaurants, both run by families and brands in three cities such as London, Oxford and Bath In terms of interview, the researcher chose semi-structure interviews to explore the views of Thai owners and management team on the impact of people training and development in the delivery of service quality These chosen interviewees hold positions such as operation, business, training managers, assistant managers in chosen Thai restaurants One non-participating observation was taken place at one specific restaurant site in Oxford to

observe how service was delivered by staffs

Originality/ value

This paper is the first study to explore the role of training and development in the delivery of service quality in selection of Thai restaurants in the UK

Keywords: Service quality, Ethnic restaurant, human resource development, people

training and development

Table of Contents

Table 1: A summary of restaurants attributes to customer dining experience in full-service restaurants

Table 2: Research design summary

Table 3: Constructing question content following the research objectives

Table 4: Time schedule interview

Table 5: Data order and display

Table 6: Cluster of data collection

Table 7: A summary of data cluster collected from interview and observation

Table of figures:

Figure 1: A conceptual framework of the thesis

Figure 2: Model illustrating alternative philosophical approaches to research (Shepard et

al., 1993)

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale ……….……….11

2 The context of the study ……… 12

3 The significance of the study……….… ………… …… 14

4 Aim and objective……….……… 15

5 Scope ……… ……… 15

6 The overall structure of the thesis ………15

7 Conclusion ……….…….17

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Introduction ……….… 18

2.1 Service……… ……….…… 19

2.3 Service quality……… 20

2.4 Customer satisfaction ……….…21

2.5 Restaurant attributes to customer experiences……… 21

2.6 Restaurants attributes to customer dining experience in ethnic restaurants……… 25

2.7 Delivery service quality through people ……… 26

2.8 Human resource management approach ……… …27

2.8 Human resource management in service industry……….… 31

9 Human resource management in SMEs in service industry Relationship between human resource management and the delivery of service quality ……… 29

2.10 Training ……… 30

2.11 Training approach ……… …33

2.12 Practice of training in SMEs ……….… 35

2.13 Conceptual framework ……… ……34

2.14 Conclusion ……… 35

CHAPET 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 3.1 Introduction ……….…… 37

3.2 Research philosophy ……….….37

3.3 Research approach and strategy……… ………39

3.3.1 Research approach ………39

3 3.2 Research strategy……… 40

3.4 Research design………40

3.5 Research sample……….……… 41

3.6 Data collection technique………45

3.6.1 Observation……… 45

3.6.2 In- depth interview……….… 47

3.7 Analysis of data ……….50

3.8 Ethnics consideration ……… ………55

3.9 Limitation of the research methodology……… 55

3.10 Conclusion……….…… 55

Chapter 4: FINDINGS 4.1 Introduction……….… 56

4.2 Findings from interview ……….……….….…57

4.3 Findings from observations ………68

4.4 Conclusion ……… …69 Chapter 5: Discussion

5.1 Introduction……… 71

5.2 Cluster 1: Restaurant attributes to customer experiences in Thai restaurants ……… ……… 71

5.3 Cluster 2: The role of staff interaction in customer experience ……….….74

5.4 Cluster 3: Practice of training and development ……….…77

5.5 Conclusion……… 79

Chapter 6: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION 6.1 Introduction……….……… 81

6.2 Accomplishing the aim of the thesis……….……… ……… 81

6.3 The unique of the study ……… …………82

6.4 Recommendations for further research ……….……….83

6.5 Limitation ……….……… ……… 83

6.6 Conclusion ……….……….……… ……….84 REFERENCES

APPENDICES

Appendix 1: Observation guide

Appendix 2: Observation note

Appendix 3: invitation to join the interview

Appendix 4: Interviewee Engagement Participant Information Sheet

Appendix 5: A consent form

Appendix 6: Interview guide

Appendix 7: Interview transcript

Appendix 8: Example of data coding

Appendix 9: Basic design of case studies undertaken in the research

Appendix 10: Demographic data about Interviewees

role in ensuring service quality (Farrel et al., 2001; Nick et al., 2005) In a sense,

well-trained staffs with certain knowledge can help to offer good service quality ( R e e s ,

1 9 9 5 )

In the hospitality industry, service skills have been of great interest (Chand, 2010) This industry has become one of the fastest growing sectors in the UK, nevertheless, there are certain challenges in matching employee skills with the industry requirements

(Baum, 2006; Thomas et al., 2000) Seen from a report of The Hospitality Training

Foundation (2000), the hospitality all over Great Britain is in need of 7,736 vacancies in July, 1999 which accounts for nearly 5 per cent of the industry demand (Prattten, 2003) Staffs in hotels and restaurants, for instance, are short of knowledge and experiences in certain operative level occupations, especially relating to customer service (Dewhurst et

al., 2007) One main reason for that shortage is due to a quality of human resource

(Pratten, 2003) Particularly in restaurants, most of full-time and part-time staffs are students or young people Reasons for their choice of joining hospitality job are in need

of money for tuition fee or looking a temporary job while studying or travelling (Lucas, 1995) They are seen an only available labour source that restauranteurs can easily approach (Lucas and Ralson, 1997) Most of them do have experience in restaurants

and consider working in restaurants as a “transient” job in their career path (Kelliher and

Perrett, 2000)

Yet, nowadays, waiters and waitresses are requested to deliver a high level of skill and knowledge in serving customers (Pratten, 2003) In such a competitive hospitality industry, every service organization needs to focus on service quality for its competitive

advantage over their competitors (Bhat, 2010) Service quality is essentially deciding an ability of service providers to attract more customers (Backman and Veldkamp, 1995) as

it impacts greatly customer satisfaction and positive post-consumption behaviours such (Olsen, 2002) On the other hand, delivering consistent and superior service is believed

to lead service business to success in terms of productivity enhancement, cost reduction, increased customer loyalty and market share improvement (Albrecht and

Zemke, 1985; Berry et al., 1989; Leonard and Sasser, 1982; Parasuraman et al., 1988;

Ross and Shetty, 1985) Gaining and maintaining service quality, hence, is a strategic target for all service firms (Behesti and Lollar, 2003) and so do restaurants, especially, in

the highly competitive restaurant industry (Ryu et al., 2012)

As a main remedy to deal with skill shortage, training is widely considered to be beneficial to improve employee competencies (e.g skills, attitudes and knowledge),

which enables them to provide higher service quality (Dewhurst et al., 2007) Training, however, is not what most managers prioritise (Wilson et al., 1998) In fact, there is a culture of training avoidance in many UK hospitality firms (Dewhurst et al., 2007)

Practically, restaurants and hotels provided lower levels of post-induction training than other sectors In particular, employers in small and medium size firms (SMEs) have less training than large firms (Frazisetal., 2000; Hoque and Bacon, 2006; Kitching and Blackburn, 2002; Small Business Service 2001; Storey, 1997) The tourism industry as

an example, has a reputation as being a poor trainer (Jameson, 2000) and much of the training happens mainly due to legislative requirements (Keep and Mayhew, 1999)

Below 50 % of small hospitality firms are engaged in training (Thomas et al., 2000) and

85% of hospitality employers provide some training for some employees (Hospitality Training Foundation, 1999)

Bearing in mind the importance skill staffs in providing service quality in the hospitality sector, impacts of training in development human resource capability, the researcher, set

a clear aim for this study It is to fill the existing research void by exploring the role of people training and development in the delivery of service quality n UK ethnic restaurant sector from owners’ and managers’ views The study focuses on UK based Thai

restaurants

2 The context of the study

Nowadays, the widespread impact of globalization can be seen clearly from the global

economy, society to culture aspects, consequently, the UK itself has turned into“a gastronomic hub with a reputation rivaling those of its continental counterparts” (Wong

and Chung, 2003) Instead of cooking at home, more people demand for dining out (Chang, 2013), which support hospitality to become the fourth largest industry in the UK and an intensive competition in the restaurant industry particularly (Symons, 2013)

In UK food service industry, particularly, restaurants are a key driver for business growth (Euromonitor, 2013) with £5.9 billion spent by foreign companies and people on dining

out services 83% of this expenditure is spent in restaurants (Silva et al., 2013)

Alongside with UK restaurant industry development, ethnic restaurants increase rapidly (Symons, 2013) This fast growth is driven mainly by an increase in UK immigrant and

“expatriate populations”, more exotic foods adopted by British people after their long

distance outbound travel to different parts of the world (Mintel, 2008) Besides, a globalisation of the food market makes consumers’ tastes more and more cosmopolitan (Leung, 2010) All these changes create a great demand of ethnic foods among UK consumers (Edwards, 2013), which triggers for an increase in outlet number of ethnic restaurants (Ebster and Guist, 2005)

An ethnic restaurant is defined as "a restaurant whose signboard or publicity clearly promises the national or regional cuisine of another land" (Turgeon and Pastinelli, 2002:

252) This type of restaurants introduces exotic cuisines which are not familiar with local customers (Ebster and Guist, 2004) Ethic food is cooked and served in a different way

with the locality (Lego et al., 2002), which is seen a powerful appeal to local customers who look for an "out-of-the-ordinary dining experience" (Boyce, 2007) Also, they play as

“cultural ambassadors” advertising not only ethnic food but culture to local customers

(Cobe, 2004; Wood and Munoz, 2007)

Regarding to ethnic food history in the UK, Chinese and Indian cuisines have become dominant since the end of the 19th century with the first arrival of Chinese and Indian immigrants (Mintel, 2008; Leung, 2010) Since the end of 1960’s, along with an increasingly popularity of ethnic cuisines, recently, emerging cuisines such as Thai have been introduced (Leung, 2010) An emergence of Thai foods has been positively supported by a trend of eating healthier foods with less oil and more vegetables in the

UK (Eurmonitor, 2008) Further, despite being similar to Chinese and Indian cooking style, Thai cuisines provide lighter and fresher alternatives (Mintel, 2007) Therefore, an increasing demand for healthier foods in the UK has brought in a potential prospect for

Thai food development in a market of differently healthier choices even though Chinese and Indian cuisine has had longer establishment and greater market (Mintel, 2007)

Yet, Sriwongrat (2008) argues that, for a success, ethnic restaurants cannot only complete on their authenticity of cuisine and ethnic atmosphere, especially when ethnic food is getting increasingly popular Indeed, although the main reasons why consumers dine in ethnic foods are food different (Roseman, 2006), ethnic restaurants should also focus on offering customers unforgettable and satisfied experience (Su, 2010) Adding to this idea, Ryu et al., (2012) propose, no customers are willing to experience poor service

or dining environment just for high quality exotic food in ethnic restaurants Today, they are demanding for an excellent overall dining experience

3 Research aims, questions and objectives

To reach the aim of the study (exploring influence of people training and development in the delivery of service quality in a selection of Thai restaurants in the UK), three research questions underpinning the study are:

• What are the factors that influence customer dining experience in Thai restaurants?

• How do restaurant owners and management team view the role of staff interaction in providing service quality in Thai restaurants?

• What is the impact of people training and development on the delivery of service quality?

To find answers for these questions, the researchers set up six objectives within the study These are

1) To review the existing literature on definition of service, service quality, restaurant attributes to customer experiences, customer satisfaction, factors affecting the delivery of service quality

2) To examine the relationship between service quality management and human resource management, specifically the impact of people training and development on the delivery of service quality with particular reference to the ethnic restaurant sector

3) To conduct primary data collection to explore owners and managers attitudes towards factors influencing a provision of good service quality to customer

4) To explore how restaurant owners and management team view the role of people training and development in improving service quality delivered in Thai restaurants

5) To analyse and discuss restaurant owners’ and management team’ perspectives on the impact of people and training practice in the delivery of service quality in Thai restaurants against the established literature

6) To provide conclusions and formulate justified recommendations for owners and managers of Thai ethnic restaurants on people training and development

to improve service quality in Thai restaurants, followed by a reflection of limitations of the study

4 The significance of the study

The study is significant and important for at least forth reasons First, it helps fill the gap

in managers’ and owners’ awareness of training benefits, particularly in the delivery of service quality Second, it contributes to understanding of training practices in restaurant organizations, ethic restaurants as an example Third, as exploring perspective of different owners and managers, a comparison can be made among these perspectives and find out the common viewpoints toward the impact of people training and development on service quality provision The last but not least, the author expects to recommend Thai restaurateurs in a way to improve service quality via human resource practices in order to meet their customer's satisfaction in the area of the UK

The scope of the study focuses on Thai restaurants in London, Oxford and Bath in the

UK Compared with other cities, these three cities are located in London/South East area which covers a largest number of restaurants in the UK (45.9 % in 2002) as well as 30 %

of UK population (British Hospitality Association, 2002).According to Pia et al., (2010),

such urban big cities (i.e London, Bath, Oxford) are where most ethnic minority groups choose to live in Further, these locations are land for inbound tourism and foreign visitors who probably have great demand for ethnic cuisines

6 The overall structure of the thesis

In order to achieve the aim of the research, this dissertation will consist six chapters based on the objectives listed below:

Chapter 1: Introduction

Starting with a background of UK hospitality, restaurant industry and a growth of ethnic restaurants including Thai, the first chapter introduces the importance of service quality, the role of skilled employee on customer perception of service quality The following part declares the necessity of people training and development to improve staff skill in a context of less training practise in the hospitality due to unawareness of training benefits among management team From that, the research aim and objectives are established together with mentioning a study scope focusing on UK based Thai restaurants Last parts of this chapter explain the format of the thesis and definitions of key terms used within the study

Chapter 2: Literature review

This chapter reviews literature on definitions of service, characteristic of service, customer satisfaction, restaurant attributes to customer experiences, which leads to the importance of service quality and the role of staff interaction in customer perception of high quality service The following part provides definition of HRM, SHRM, PM, training and development It addresses the important of HRM practices in the service industry, training practices and available training approach to improve service quality

Chapter 4: Research methodology

Chapter 4 begins with a choice of phenomenology philosophy, qualitative research, multi-case study, the research design with non-probability sample, observation and interview technique is explained by discussing both advantages and disadvantages of each deployed method The section then observations and semi- structured interviews are chosen to gain rich primary data The latter is followed by the analysis of the sample selection and process of the data collection and analysis The last part of this chapter includes discussion of methodology limitations that might have had effect on this research

Chapter 5: Research Findings and Discussion

This chapter provide the readers with key insights from interviews and observation about how Thai restaurant owners and managers rank the importance of service quality and the current practices of adopting people training and development in improving service quality in Thai restaurants

Chapter 6: Conclusion and Recommendation

The final part of this thesis, chapter 6 draws conclusions from the gathered primary data analysis This will add value to the industry in making the topic more transparent and give best practices advice for restaurants owners and managers who are planning to

implement people training and development in improving service quality The latter is followed by the discussion of this research's uniqueness and implications of findings for academic audiences and practitioners in hospitality industry Finally, this chapter concludes with the discussion of the research limitation, followed by the identification of the areas that need further research and development

2 Main definitions

This part is to define ethnic Thai restaurants mentioned as the population in this thesis Based on the definition of ethnic restaurants by Easter and Guist (2004) and Turgeon and Pastinelli (2002; 252), in this study, ethic Thai restaurants (or ethnically- themedThai restaurants) are full-service restaurants serving Thai cuisines

Goldman (1993) claims that the upscale restaurant segment provides different restaurant concepts, of which an ethnic concept is one example Features of an upscale restaurant are introducing a full menu, full table service, high-quality food produced with fresh ingredients, personalised service and décor Common types of upscale restaurant segment range from high-check, casual-dining and fine-dining restaurants (Goldman, 1993) For the purpose of this thesis, upscale ethnic restaurant population consists of casual and fine dining units offering full service, a table service provided regarding Thai themed restaurants

For the size of restaurants, small and medium size restaurants are the focus of the research An identification of the restaurant size depends on the number of employees each unit hires (Barrett and Buttigieg, 1999) According to The European Commission (DTI, 2001) small businesses have 10–49 employees and medium-sized enterprises employ 50–249 employees

3 Conclusion

This chapter has presented the background of this study and outlines the research aim and objectives From this chapter, the readers should obtain the overall themes of the study which will be taken into consideration in more details in the following chapters The next chapter, literature review, will provide more in- depth insights in terms of theories related to ethic restaurant development, customer selection criteria of restaurants and the importance of service quality These literatures are to develop the foundation for the

primary data collection

Chapter 2: Literature review

1 Introduction

The chapter reviews literature on service definition, characteristic of service, service quality, customer satisfaction, restaurants attributes to customer experiences, a provision of service quality through people As coping with increasing customer sophisticated demand and high competitive hospitality industry, every service company should focus on improve their service quality delivered to customer One of the main factors affecting the delivery of service quality is skills, knowledge and attitude of service employees As a result, people training and development plays an important role in creating learning experiences to improve employees' performance, in turn, helps organization to gain business success However, seen from literature review, there is a lack of training practices among SMEs, specifically on restaurants industry One of the main reasons for that shortage is, high training cost and SMEs owners are not aware of training value such as business improvement, human resource development Even there are some academic sources showing evidences of informal training conducted in small business However, it is necessary to have an academic framework of training practices for small business where organizations are intensive-labour Based on these arguments,

it is necessary to carry out more research to fill in the gap in terms of academic study as well as practices aspects By doing that, owners or managers should find the important

role of people training and development in delivering service quality in Thai restaurants

2 Service

Definition

Defined by Looy et al (2003:11), service is “any activity that one party can offer to

another that is essentially intangible and does not result in the ownership of anything”

Another author defines services to be “deeds, processes and performances” (Zeithaml et

al., 2006: 4) Hints from these definitions indicate that services have a nature of more

processes than products

Nature of Services

Widely accepted in marketing literature, major features of services are intangibility, heterogeneity, perishability and inseparability of production and consumption (Shostack,

1977, 1982)

Intangibility: Not like tangible products, services cannot be sensed in a way of being felt,

tasted or touched (Zeithaml et al., 2006:22) This core characteristic of services leads to

the fact that the evaluation of servicesh as to be done during or after a service being

purchased (Looy et al., 2003:12; Parasuramanet al., 1985)

Heterogeneity: Services are treated as performances that humans provide to customers,

thus there exists differences in services produced It means, different employees can offer varied services, therefore, ensuring a consistent level of service quality is not that

easy (Zeithaml et al., 2006)

Perishability: Not like physical product, services cannot be stored, inventoried It means, when services are produces, they need being consumed (Zeithaml et al., 2006)

Following to Looy et al (2003), as services have to be consumed once they are made,

service providers should predict how much demand for services, which is normally unpredictable

Inseparability: According to Rathmell (1974), service providers and consumers cannot

be separated during a process services are being provided It means, customers and service employees interact with each other (Zeithaml, 1981)

Due to these main features, the evaluation of service quality is more challenging than that of physical products (Shostack, 1982)

3 Service quality

Service quality is an attitude of evaluating a provision of service in a long term (Looy et al., 2003) In 1994, Rust and Oliver established a model to conceptualize service quality with three indicators such as service environment, service outcome and customer–employee interaction Based on the work of Rust and Oliver (1994), Brady and Cronin (2001) introduce another conceptualization of service quality including three factors (i.e physical environment quality, output quality and interaction quality) As such, quality of physical environment is decided by atmosphere characteristics, decoration and design Output quality is tested by food quality, time for waiting Interaction quality is evaluated

by attitude, behaviour and skill According to Brady and Cronin (2001), these all factors are main contributors to measure service quality

In hospitality industry, especially catering sector, nature of service quality is deemed to

be “individualized, intangible and subjective” (Johns and Howard, 1998) Lots of

hospitality scholars have shown interests in how conceptualizing and measuring service quality during the last decade (Nelson and Raymond, 2011).For example, argued by Grönroos (1984), service quality can be classified into technical and functional quality Technical quality means what the customer is received such as food quality they are provided in restaurants Meanwhile, functional characteristic refers to psychological and behavioural features which can be seen through interaction and atmosphere influencing the delivery of service quality Hospitality literature seems to care more about the functional quality than the technical side of quality (Nelson and Raymond, 2011)

According to Grönroos (2001), service quality is not as easy to be evaluated as physical products because the production and consumption of a service experience can be not separated (Zeithaml and Bitner, 2003) and service evaluation is linked closely with quality perception of service quality Stated by Grönroos (2001), one way to evaluate service quality is from customer perception As followed, service quality is defined as the degree of matching between customer before-purchasing expectations and their

perceptions of the service performance (Sureshchander et al., 2002) According to Ha

and Jang (2010), the degree of matching customer expectations and their actual restaurant experiences leads to a status of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, which is discussed in the next part of the chapter

4 Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is defined as an evaluative decision after purchase (Day, 1984) This decision of evaluation is done when customers compare their actual experiences of product/service consumption with their before-purchasing expectations (Oliver, 1980, 1989) If the actual performance exceeds expectations, customers will be satisfied; and if the actual performance is worse than expected, customers will be dissatisfied (Ha and Jang, 2010) Argued by Tse and Peter (1988), a level of dissatisfaction or satisfaction influences an attitude toward the product or service and future behavioural intentions.It means, if customers are happy with their consumption of certain products/services, they could repeat their buying in the future (Carpenter, 2007) Seen in this perspective, meeting customer satisfaction is very important for every hospitality organization if they would like to have more returning customers To make customer satisfied, according to Grönroos (2001), service organizations need to understand what kind of service

customers are in demand at which level of quality Thanks to knowing what consumers need, they could find a way to meet their expectation (Sureshchander et al., 2002)

Viewed from a performance-based approach, many previous studies (Lin, 2004; Mano and Oliver, 1993; Westbrook and Oliver, 1991) have insisted that customer satisfaction goes hand in hand with cognitive judgments and affective reactions It means, customer satisfaction is decided when customers consume products or experience performance of service providers (Westbrook, 1987; Yi, 1990) In the restaurant sector, customers evaluate their satisfaction by assessing their dining experiences based on how their motivations or goals are fulfilled (Roseman, 1996).Supporting this idea, Oliver (1997) claims that, the level of how dining experiences reach customers goals likely leads to emotional states of being pleasure or unpleasant In a field of psychology research, customer emotional states depriving from consumption experience have a great effect

on customers’ satisfaction (Mano and Oliver, 1993; Oliver, 1993) It means, a customer’s feeling status is impacted by the performance of service providers (Han and Jeong, 2013) Specifically in the restaurant context, interaction between customers and service providers is considered as a factor influencing customers’ reaction (Namasivayam and Mattila, 2007) Adding to this argument, Ha and Jang (2010) clarify customer reactions could be reflected by their behavioural intentions in the future such as repurchase intention, positive word-of-mouth intention and willingness to recommend All these reactions are a reflection of customer satisfaction (Ha and Jang, 2010) From this perspective, it can be concluded that restaurants should pay attention to staff

performance and communication when they provide services (Zeithaml et al., 2006; Solomon et al., 1985) By managing staff interaction in delivering service, they can

satisfy their customers and influence their post dinning behaviours such as

recommendation or willingness to pay more (Ladhari et al., 2008)

5 Customer experiences in full- service restaurants

According to Carlback (2011), the food-service industry belongs to the economy of experience For success, every restaurant are interested in clarifying what factors influence customer dining experiences and then establish business strategy to develop these determined factors for further improvement of customer satisfaction and loyalty (Monteiro, 2000) Indeed, customer experience is the crucial antecedent factor influencing customer satisfaction then post-purchasing intention such as, word-of-mouth,

loyalty, complaining behaviour and price susceptibility (Sajeev and Mark, 2001; Su,

2011) For example, in a study of word-of-mouth advertising influence, Plymire (1991) indicates, most of customers (about 91 percent) who are not satisfied with restaurants service will not come back and tell eight to ten others about their experiences In ethnic restaurants, Raymond and Tian (2002) believe that, customers tend to feel comfortable when dinning at a new restaurant if they know their friends used to have a good time there

Restaurant experience goes hand in hand with the evaluation of restaurant characteristics (Johns and Pine, 2002 and Park, 2004) Many scholars have studied which attributes impact customer evaluation of restaurants Table 1 represents

a summary of various factors affecting a restaurant experience identified in previous studies

Table 1: A summary of restaurants attributes to customer dining experience in service restaurants

full-Authors Empirical setting Sample Methodology Main findings

Q u a l i t a t i v e

i n t e r v i e w s a n d regression analysis

Responsiveness, food quality, and price were identified as the key restaurant attributes driving customer satisfaction

R e g r e s s i o n analysis

Food quality and service impact customersatisfaction, while food quality, service and ambience and menu price affect customer perceptions of value

D e s c r i p t i v e statistics

Food list, food quality, food price, atmosphere and speed of service are the key factors deciding customer selection of restaurants Hyun (2009) United States


Chain restaurants

208 Convenience sampling

Structural equation modelling

Value equity comprised of food quality, service quality, price,

l o c a t i o n a n d e n v i r o n m e n t significantly affected customer equity

Factor analysis and Structural equation modelling

Food quality, authentic food, restaurant environment are the most important factors influencing customer perception of value,

e m o t i o n s a n d b e h a v i o u r a l intentions

Shown in Table 1, what attributes to customer experience can be tangible things such as food and layout (e.g Clark and Wood, 1998) or intangible elements such as atmosphere and staff friendliness (Jang et al., 2012) Differences among the attributes type is due to various type of restaurant services (fine dining, fast food, or ethnic restaurants) In

hospitality industry, Reuland et al (1985) claim, what contributes to a service experience

comes from a harmonious collection of the material product, the behaviour and attitude

of the employees and the environment As argued by Clark and Wood (1999), food quality, restaurant ambience and service are crucial variables affecting customer choice

of restaurants

Food quality

The quality of certain food is reflected by tastes, cooking ingredients (Su, 2008); menu variety (Wansink et al., 2005); good presentation (Rozin and Tuorila, 1993); healthy food options (Namkung and Jang, 2007), nutritional value (Howlett et al., 2009) Food quality is considered to affect customer satisfaction and post-dinning behavioural intention (Liu and Jang, 2009) in full- service segment (Sulek and Hensley, 2004) or in authentic segment (George, 2001; Namkung and Jang, 2007) For example, authentic food is favoured more than the decoration, music and uniforms in an authentic restaurant setting (George, 2001) That is why food quality is seen as the main factor driving customers to visit ethnic restaurants (Su, 2008) In addition, Jeong and Jang

A N O V A a n d

i m p o r t a n t

-p e r f o r m a n c e analysis

Identified common and unique attributes of six types of Asian food Importance of appearance, health-related, uniqueness and others differed across six Asian restaurants

Factor analysis and logistic regression

F o o d q u a l i t y, s e r v i c e a n d uniqueness of the restaurant are assigned more importance among the nine attributes determining the preference toward choosing a restaurant

Qu (1997) United States


Chinese restaurants

1 2 4 S y s t e m a t i c sampling

F a c t o r a n d regression analysis

Food and environment, service and courtesy, price and value, and location were related to choice intention attributes Food and environment had the largest impact on intentions to coming back again

Authors Empirical setting Sample Methodology Main findings

(2011) believe high-tasting food encourages customers to recommend in terms of of-mouth

word-Restaurant atmosphere

Restaurant atmosphere refers to the surrounding quality made from music, lighting, color and scent (Liu and Jang, 2009) In ethnic restaurant setting, physical environment is considered as a key factor affecting customers’ positive evaluations of restaurant (Dube and Renaghan, 2000, Lin and Mattila, 2010), their emotional responses (Ryu and Jang, 2007), which in turn affects customers’ post-dining behavioral intentions Accordingly, customers can decide to approach or avoid a particular environment due to their evaluation of a restaurant experiences based on restaurant environment (Wall and Berry, 2007) Indeed, ethnic music and decoration can impact customers 'menu selection in authentic Chinese restaurants (Ryu and Zhong, 2012) These authors suggest that when

a positive feel of physical environment likely make customers trust the restaurant service and less suspect food quality

Service

Regarding to the restaurant industry, Kotler et al (1998) argues, customers have a high

level of contact with service employees while enjoying services, therefore, they assess the service experiences based on the skills and performance of service providers When customers have a positive evaluation of employee interactions, they will have a long-run perception of entire service quality (Czepiel, 1990) In another case, when customers have a negative perception of restaurant atmosphere, impressive employee behaviour could help improve consumers’ perception of dining experience (Wall and Berry, 2007) Adding to this idea, Brooks (2000) believes how employees interact with customers affects 40–80% of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty Indeed, Nick (1998) claims that, when customers see enthusiasm and capability to provide products/services among employees, they will have a good perception of the service quality From these arguments, no doubt, employee interactions play a vital role in customer experiences in terms of influencing customers’ perception of service quality (Cowell, 1989) Therefore,

to make customer have a good perception of service quality, restaurateurs need to improve employees’ skills and attitudes in interacting with customers while service is being provided

6 Restaurants attributes to customer dining experience in ethnic restaurants

Particularly in ethnic restaurant sector, recently, food quality and ethnic atmosphere are

not all what customers want for an ethnic dining experience (Jang et al., 2011) A true

type, taste and culture of restaurant environment and good- tasting food make up

"authenticity" (Carroll and Wheaton, 2009; Ebster and Guist, 2004) This kind of authenticity provides an out-of-ordinary dining experiences such as “culinary tourism

”which is totally different with customer native region and local rivals (Ebster and Guist,

2004; Wood and Munoz, 2006), As a result, customer can perceive an unique authenticity which is seen one of the main drivers of customer satisfaction in ethnic dining restaurants because today (Tsai and Liu, 2012) Yet, as ethnic food is getting more and more popular, ethnic restaurants cannot only depend on their authenticity of tasting food and restaurant surroundings to become successful (Sriwongrat, 2008) In other words, even though food quality is an important factor contributing to authenticity perceptions (Munoz and Wood, 2009; Tsai and Lu, 2012), it is not appealing enough to drive customers to make a visit (Su, 2011) In some situations, customers do not have knowledge to determine food authenticity, they look for something apart from only a meal for eating (Wang and Mattila, 2015) In upscale restaurant segment particularly for groups of customers who are seeking for adventurous and healthy alternatives for example, Yuksel and Yuksel (2002) believe that consumers demand for a complete dining experience, not just high quality food Similarly, in a market of full-service restaurants, service responsiveness is the most important contributor against food quality, physical environment (design and decoration as examples) to customer

satisfaction (Andaleeb and Conway, 2006) In other words, Ryu et al., (2012) propose

that, no customers are willing to experience poor service or dining environment just for high quality exotic food in ethnic restaurants Further, in a survey of three types of

diners, fine diners, casual diners and quick-service, Stevens et al (1995) acknowledge

that, the higher perception of service quality customers have, the more intension of returning and recommending they will have Seen from these perspectives, obviously, ethnic restaurants should also focus on offering customers unforgettable and satisfied experience including not only good food, good atmosphere but high-quality service (Su,

2010) As staffs interaction influences how services are provided and how customers evaluate the quality of service delivered (Namasivayam and Mattila, 2007), restauranteurs need to focus on people with a view to ensure a high quality service provision

7 Delivering Service Quality through people

In the hospitality sector, an uncertainty of customer demand has brought in challenges in defining, delivering and measuring service quality for service firms As such, due to fluctuation in customer demand for service between peak periods (e.g checkout time or holiday) and off peak seasons, every firm struggles to deliver a consistent level service

quality during these seasons (Sasser et al., 1978) Stated by Nickson et al (2005), one

effective way to maintain the delivery of service is managing the way services are provided by service employees

Arguably, hospitality employees contact directly and frequently with customers when

they provide services (Kotler et al., 1998) They are seen a part of the product in a sense

that their performance and communication with customers contributes to the service

experience, which affects how customers perceive service quality (Nickson et al., 2005)

For example, when staffs are not quick enough to serve food to customers or delay in carrying food from kitchens to tables, customers cannot enjoy hot food as it should be They could be disappointed and have a negative view about the service quality (Pratten, 2003) In this case, it can be understood that even the food are of good quality but slow speed of serving could run that quality In contrast, when staffs make some mistakes in serving guests, they still can satisfy customers with suitable reactions (Bitner and Booms, 1990) Appropriate responses that consumers are expecting employees to display, generally, are being attentive, courteous and possess a good knowledge of the

menu (Heung et al., 2000; Pratten, 2003; Sulek and Hensley, 2004)

Customers’ perception of service quality is influenced by employee behaviours (Bitner et

al.,1990; Parasuraman et al., 1988) In such, staff behaviours such as reliability,

assurance, responsiveness, and empathy are main attributes to customer evaluation of quality (Russell and Pratt, 1980) Meanwhile, these authors suggest restaurant ambiences influences more on customer states of feeling such as pleasure or unpleasure Hints from these examples indicate that, staff interactions play an important part in customer perception of the service quality, therefore, service firms have to pay

attention to human capital such as knowledge, skill and attitude (Altinay et al., 2008)

Supporting the argument of Altinay et al (2008), Wilson et al (2008: 280), suggest service organizations need to establish human resource strategies to make sure “service employees are willing and able to deliver quality services and that they stay motivated to perform in customer-oriented, service-minded ways" It means, organizations have to set

up strategies to “hire the right people, develop people to deliver service quality, provide the needed support systems, and retain the best people" The next part is going to

discuss in details which kind of human resource strategies is applicable to improve service employee capabilities of providing a high quality service in a case of ethnic restaurants

8 Human resource management approaches

Gaining competitive advantages and innovation in human resource management (HRM) practices are what every firm is looking for with a view to utilizing its human capital (Tan and Nasurdin, 2011) According to Stone (2005), HRM relates to internally consistent policies, practices and systems to motivate and attract employees whose behaviour, attitudes and performance have a strong impact on the survival of the

organization.HRMis a "strategic approach" to help firms develop human resource capacities and commitment towards long- term competitive advantage (Bratton and Gold, 2012: 7) As such, “strategic” and “competitive advantage” is the focus of HRM,

which orients a right direction for companies to plan, monitor and control their resources

to achieve its goal (Lojie et al., 2012) Argued by Sisson (1994), the introduction of HRM

is a result of the search for competitive advantage At the same time, human resource has been acknowledged as a crucial source of the firms' competitive advantage over

their rivals, not just "simply one of the factors of production, along with money and machinery" (Sisson, 1994: 4) Therefore, how employees are recruited, trained,

rewarded, motivated and disciplined influences significantly the business success (Sisson, 1994) Moreover, compared with external factors such as politics, economy, society and culture which impact employees’ relation and performance, HRM is advanced in terms of team development and employee empowerment in long run (Ihuah, 2014)

Personnel Management

In comparison with HRM which focuses on resources to achieve the organization’s goal,

the concentration of personnel management (PM) is managing labour force (Lojie et al.,

n.d) PM is defined “as the optimum utilisation of human resources in pursuit of organization goals” (Legge, 2005: 46) Under PM approach, organizations take

administration of their human resources by staffing, recruitment, compensation and benefits (Rowden; 1999; Wei 2006; Ulrich, 1997) to meet four requirements These are meeting objectives related to all employees, goals related to work, objectives relating to management changes and administrative goals (Torrington et al., 2004) The advantage

of PM application is maintaining a good employee- employer relationship by a means of

training and satisfying employees' needs (Grimsley, 2014) An "effective PM", as claimed

by Boella and Goss-Turner (2005), requires fair share and conditions among employees

at work However, the downside of PM is a limited strategic orientation such as a shortage of integration among its labour practices (David and Geoffrey, 2009) Indeed,

Drucker (1961: 269) indicates that, PM is as "a collection of incidental techniques with little internal cohesion As personnel administration conceives the job of managing worker and work, it is partly a file clerk’s job, partly a house keeping job, partly a social worker’s job and partly firefighting to head off union trouble or to settle it" Although

Guest (1990) argues that the focus of PM is organisational survival and worker welfare, that welfare role is seen as a lack of credibility related to managerial function (David and Geoffrey, 2009)

Arguably, the development and operation in ethnic restaurants in UK catering industry have been influenced by cultural values, attitudes, behaviours and perceptions of entrepreneurial opportunities (Basu and Altinay, 2002 cited in Abdullah et al., 2009), These factors require restaurants to develop human resource and empower employee for a long term (Stone, 2005) Moreover, service organizations also need to find a way to accumulate human capacities to sustain their competitive advantage over their rivals Therefore, an adoption of HRM is seen as crucial and beneficial choice for service firms (Kakavelakis, 2010)

Philosophy of managing people

Schuler (1989) suggests three major philosophies for managing people, "facilitation'',

"accumulation'', and "utilisation'' which are used to link people management with management values "Accumulation" refers to a longer-term approach to manage people, especially in terms of selecting the "right type of person'' and people investing such as training and building long-term relationships "Utilisation'', on the other hand, is a

short-term approach, in which staffs are recruited on the basis of skill, given little training

and provided remuneration and incentive based on individuals Meanwhile, "facilitation''

allows organizations develop employees value, of which an example can be stimulating and rewarding environment to retain valued staff In assessing strengths of these three approaches, Schuler (1989) proposes that utilisation is most appropriately used with a cost reduction strategy, accumulation with a quality enhancement strategy and facilitation with a development strategy

9 Relationship between human resource management and the delivery of

service quality

In the service industry, every organisation has to cope with increasingly customer

demand for high quality service (Dewhurst et al., 2007) in terms of attentive, flexible and

novelty aspects (Peter, 1987) On the other hand, as there is a high level of employee contact in the hospitality sector, staff interactions are considered to influence significantly customer perception of service quality (Sheng and Lin, 2004) Thus, one widely accepted way to ensure the service quality offered is via managing employee performance and behaviours (Bowen and Schneider, 1988; Carlzon, 1987)

customer-Stated by Morrison (1996), the adoption of HRM practices can help firms create an encouraging environment for employees to have more customer-oriented behaviour HRM practices to improve employees' behaviours performance are selection, hiring, appraisal, promotions, and reward administration following customer-oriented value (Schein, 1985; Ulrich et al., 1991) Namely, service organizations recruited and hired employees following a basis of duties and experiences Employees then are trained with necessary skills to carry out their work requirements, especially how to meet customer needs and wants (Ulrich, 1989) Every positive performance of employees that meets customer demand are appraised and rewarded By doing that, companies can link meeting-customer-need orientation in managing human resource, which helps increase

a share of “mindset among employees and customers” (Ulrich et al., 1991: 91) Argued

by Zerbe et al (1998), the use of these HRM practices shape employee behaviours and

skills of doing their work, in turn, affect organizational effectiveness Supporting this idea, Schneider and Bowen (1985) explained, under HRM approach towards customer orientation, employees could perceive what their firms do to improve their performance

in serving customers, which helps to navigate their customer-oriented behaviours (Zerbe, Dobni, and Harel, 1998) In a sense, employees are willing to treat customers as well as the way they are treated by their companies (Bowen Schneider and, 1993)

Based in this perspective, it is necessary for every service firm to carry out HRM practices in order to develop customer-oriented behaviour among employees By focusing on selection, training, and compensation of employees, service firms could

improve their service quality delivered by their staffs (Fey et al., 2000; Schneider and

planned and done by management team to “improve employee competency levels and organisational performance" It means, management team set up system, standards and

time frame to create employees learning experience in terms of skill, attitude and knowledge in order to develop their performance at work (Mccleland, 2002; Sommerville, 2007)

Benefit of training in hospitality industry

According to Ram et al (2000), training and development belongs to human resource development (HRD) and is seen as significantly important for the development of every organization In a context that recruiting skilled employees is not that easy, organizations need to develop a flexible and skilful labour so that they can do their job effectively

(Garavan et al., 1995) Dewhurst et al (2007)believes training stimulates employee

capability of learning, sharing knowledge to do their work effectively and efficiently in terms of proving better service quality Namely, employees adopting what they are taught during training provide a better service than who are not trained In a sense, they are able to carry out service task in a dependable, reliable and flexible way; present a quick

response and present a confidence in communicating with customers (Zumrah et al.,

2013) By providing a superior service, trained staffs can meet customer satisfaction and

in turn, organizations have more customer returning (Delaney and Huselid, 2007) Further, investment on training allows organizations to reduce staff turnover (Storey, 2002) As such, when staffs are able to improve their performance such as providing a better service, they gain their satisfaction at work (Malhotra and Mukherjee, 2004) Since then, the type of these employees shows more commitment to work for organizations

which give them training (Back et al., 2011) Another explanation is that, compared with

large organizations, small firms likely have less internal labour market, therefore, they

tend to provide less career progression to trained employees That is why workers are more likely to quit for where they can have better career path (Holtman and Idson, 2001)

Joining such a high competitive hospitality industry where customer demand is getting more sophisticated, service organizations at all sizes cannot offer high quality service if they do not have well-trained and skilled human resources (Rees, 1995; Altinay and Altinay, 2006) Employees with qualified knowledge, skills and behaviour are a key factor

deciding a firm’s success (Altinay and Altinay, 2006) Argued by Wilson et al (2008),

service organizations can improve quality of service provided to customers by conducting training focusing on customer-oriented behaviours Therefore, it cannot be denial that training is a key procedure to arm employees with necessary skills and knowledge to improve their performance following organization requirements (Kerr and McDougall, 1999) According to Spector (1997) and Storey (1994), people training and development is what all service organizations as well as modern restaurants and SMEs

(Eaglen et al., 2000; Johnson and Gubbins, 1992) prioritize to gain their competitive

advantage The next part will elaborate in detail which training approach is suitable for service quality improvement

11 Training approach

Today, the adoption of training should depend on the need of organization and employers as well as philosophy of the management team (Salas et al., 1999; Zainal and Adullah, 2003) As operating in the service industry, service organizations had better conduct training content and method to improve their delivery of service quality

(Mosahab et al., 2011)

Training content: hard/soft/ aesthetic skill training

Training content relates to what type of training that employees provide to trainees

(Tharenou et al., 2007) It is impacted competencies demand of the industry (Pratten, 2003) as well as firm goals of training (Gist et al., 1990) In this case, competencies can

be defined as necessary skills and knowledge to fulfil requirements of a particular job (Tas, 1988) A topic of which skills are required in the service industry has received lot of interest studies of Burns (1997) and Pratten (2003) Following to the two researches, required skills for service staffs belong to three categories, hard, soft and aesthetic skills

These three sections of skills are the main training content for service organizations Hard skill training (or technical training) is to guide staffs how to carry out serving procedures, use company equipment and provide them specific product knowledge (e.g

food, drink) (Nick et al., 2005).The purpose of this method is to ensure staffs provide

service in a right and effective way following instructions of managers or supervisors (Wilson et al., 2008) Besides, soft skill training (or functional training) instructs staffs

how to communicate with customers to provide "courteous, caring, responsive and empathetic service" (Wilson et al., 2008: 283).The focus of this method is to educate

staffs with appropriate attitudes and behaviours when they interact with the guest (Hallier and Butts 1999; Guerrier and Adib 2003) In some multicultural working environment where there is a diversity in workforce (Bochner, 1982), service employees are also given cross-cultural training Under this section, trainers equip trainees with necessary information and tools to avoid misunderstanding and inappropriate behaviours which might lead to cultural conflicts in working places (Lee and Chon, 2000) Thanks to that, learners are believed to gain confidence in communicating with people from different background (Back and Mendenhall, 1990) Additionally, aesthetic skills instructions is to orient staffs how to prepare their appearance such as good looking when they are on

job duty (Nickson et al., 2005)

Training methods: on-job training/ off-job training

There are two types of training methods Under off-job training approach (or formal trainings), employees are given oral or written information presenting concepts or principals to develop employee knowledge and skills for performing a certain task, which helps to develop (Blanchard and Thacker, 1998) In contrast, following to on-job training (or informal training), trainers provide trainees with practice behaviours that they have to display at real working setting (Ahammad, 2013)

• Off-the-job training methods include lecture and computer-based training which can be organized outside actual workplace This approach is suitable for sharing knowledge among lots of people as well as allows self- study of each trainee (Ahammad, 2013) Computer based training means, trainees use computers to access training sections (Jerris, 1999)

• On-the-job training methods provide staffs certain techniques and specific tasks

to do their particular job following day-to-day need set by management team

(Curran et al., 1997; Monder et al., 2000) Under this approach, employees are

given particular the knowledge and skills required in their positions related to job requirements (Ahammad, 2013)

Employee empowerment

Beside training method and content, empowerment is other aspect of training that plays

as asignificant role in increasing job satisfaction and organizational commitment within

organizations (Wilson et al., 2008) Empowerment means giving employees necessary

knowledge and tools so that they can make their own decisions, daily decisions as an

example, within their permitted responsibilities (Bowen and Lawler, 1992; Lee et al.,

1999) An advantage of giving employees that authority is to increase attention, response, reliability in employee behaviours (Bateson, 1995) Particular in the service industry, giving authority to staff is important because it helps employees react to customer’s demand for service in a quick and effective way (Kelley, 1993)

Consequently, service staffs are flexible enough to make “on-the-pot decisions” to please

customer needs (Hartline and Ferrell, 1996), which assists to improve customer’s perception of higher service quality (Lashley, 1995) In addition, when employees are given authority, they have a feeling of being trusted by management team (Khan, 1997)

In turn, they show more commitment at work, which again stimulates their better

provision of service quality (Hellriegel et al., 1999)

12 Practice of training in the hospitality industry

Widely accepted is that training is beneficial in terms of staff competencies development

to improve the service quality provided, nevertheless, there is not much attention in

training practice (Altinay el al., 2008) Arguably, there is a lack of training in small and

medium size organizations (Coetzer and Perry, 2008; Harris, 2009) due to a number of reasons First, the cost small firms spend on training is higher than in large firms As such,larger firms can put more employees to join training at the same time so they can save fixed cost of training per unit In contrast, smaller organizations sometimes do not have a number of employees big enough for one training, so more training sections have

to be conducted which increase fixed cost (Lynch and Black, 1998) Second, internal workforce in large firms tends to keep more employee retention, bringing in return on training investments (Green, 1993) Third, small firms may not be convinced that focusing on training activities could improve their business performance (Storey and

Westhead, 1997) Indeed, owners in smaller firms see training value in "academic" and abstract perspective, which is beyond their immediate business concerns (Smith et al.,

2002; Storey, 1999) As having high customer and market uncertainly, smaller organizations have less demand for training than in large firms In addition, these firms

likely thinkthe skills they train their employees can be applied outside their firms, so preventing them from investing on training (Storey, 1999) For all these reasons, smaller firms are less likely to provide training for their employees However, less investment in training mainly leads to low productivity growth and poor performance within SMEs (Ashton and Felstead, 2001)

An application of training practices depends on business type and level of services Differences in business type (e.g brand or non-brand businesses, small or medium size

organizations) influence a choice of training practice (Eaglen et al., 2000) According to

these authors, branded organizations or are favourable for formal trainings so as to maintain a consistent level of service to consumers In other words, these companies apply formal training for enhancing their standard of service quality Another factor is organization sizes Small companies tend to provide less formal training or less training

than large organizations (Curran et al., 1996) Claimed by Ram et al (2001), small firms

offer informal training on their day-to-day need within a short time period Differences in level of service also affect training approach For an example, in up-scale restaurants where customer demand for a certain high level of service quality, new head chief is still given some trainings Even before starting working for particular restaurants, a head chef has to possess certain skills However, some on-job training helps them get used to

a unique cooking way in their new working place (Monder et al., 2000)

13 Conceptual framework

A conceptual framework is defined as research paper structure giving explanation of

main things the study aims to investigate (Miles et al., 1994: 18) Following this

definition, a conceptual framework of this dissertation will represent key topics with a view to fulfilling the research aim A visual framework is illustrated in Figure 1for a clear understanding In narrative form, the conceptual framework of this dissertation can be outlined in the following structure, part of which has been already covered during the literature review

1) Business type of Thai restaurant samples

2) Restaurants attribute to customer experiences in Thai restaurants

3) Human resource management in Thai restaurants

4) Training approach in terms of method and content

5) The effect of training in the delivery of service quality in Thai restaurants

Figure 1: A conceptual framework of the thesis

2.13 Conclusion

This chapter successfully meet the research objective 1 and 2 It reviews literature on definitions of service, characteristic of service, customer satisfaction, restaurant attributes to customer experiences, which leads to the importance of service quality and the role of staff interaction in customer perception of high quality service The following part provides definition of HRM, SHRM, PM and addresses the important of HRM practices in the service industry As coping with increasing customer sophisticated demand and high competitive hospitality industry, every service company should focus

on improve their service quality delivered to customer One of the main factors affecting the delivery of service quality is skills, knowledge and attitude of service employees As

a result, people training and development plays an important role in creating learning experiences to improve employees' performance, in turn, helps organization to gain business success However, seen from literature review, there is a lack of training practices among SMEs, specifically on restaurants industry One of the main reasons for that shortage is, high training cost and SMEs owners are not aware of training value such as business improvement, human resource development Even there are some academic sources showing evidences of informal training conducted in small business However, it is necessary to have an academic framework of training practices for small business where organizations are intensive-labour Based on these arguments, it is necessary to carry out more research to fill in the gap in terms of academic study as well

as practices aspects By doing that, owners or managers should find the important role

of people training and development in delivering service quality in Thai restaurants

The next section will explain the choice of the methodology to collect the primary data in order to fill the gap displayed in the conceptual framework

Chapter 3: Research methodology and design

2 Research philosophy

In doing research, researchers need to choose either positivism or phenomenology, of which the chosen philosophy impacts the type of data collected (quantitative or qualitative) and research methods (Altinay and Paraskevas, 2008) (Figure2) Also, a choice of adequate philosophy depends on the research question of each study(Saunders et al., 2012) Positivism enables researchers to investigate the reality by

“identified, quantified, and reported as a verifiable fact” and the process of examination can be separated with data analysis (Shepard et al., 1993) In means, researchers could

observe the reality from a distant view (Levin, 1988), establishing hypothesis of anticipated inter relationships among variables within the reality (Hirschheim, 1985) Afterwards, researchers collect data which is presented by statistics to test hypotheses set in advance (Altinay and Paraskevas, 2008).This philosophy is seen as an objective approach in which the process of data analysis and collection is separated (Easter- Smith, 1999) Relationships among variables are presented by facts or numbers following scientific research way (Altinay and Paraskevas, 2008; Thorpe and Lowe, 1999)

Figure 2: Model illustrating alternative philosophical approaches to research (Shepard et al., 1993)

In contrast, phenomenology aims at describing, explaining social reality by interpreting people experiences from their perspectives, behaviours and motives (Easterby- Smith et

al., 2002; Titchen and Hobson, 2005) As different people possess different perspectives

towards their living context, this philosophy allows an examination of different realities to find out common themes, therefore, help researchers understand deeply perspectives of

specific people group (Shepard et al., 1993) Compared with positivism approach in

which researchers observe the reality from far-away view,the later enables researchers

to get in the phenomenon, interact with “stakeholders” or observe people to explore their

experiences (Titchen and Hobson, 2005)

Based on the research purpose, a choice of phenomenology was deemed as appropriate By adopting this approach, the researcher could join Thai restaurants setting, observing how staffs are trained to serve customers, interacting with restaurants owners and managers to understand their way of thinking Hence, she could have an in- depth understandings of situations and behaviours of related people within Thai restaurant setting that she studied (Shaw, 1999) As such, the author could investigate different perspectives of owners and managers towards there search topic, consequently, she could point out some differences and similarities among these people

(Easterby- Smith et al., 1999; Gray, 2004; Saunders et al., 2007)

3 Research approach and strategy

3.3.1 Research approach

The study adopted qualitative approach because of its suitability with the research questions (Bryman, 1988) Arguably, the focus of qualitative research is to explain meanings, concepts and features of the phenomenon (Berg, 2001) In contrast, quantitative research is to measure and examine cause-and-effect relationships among variables (Denzin and Lincoln, 1998) As the research aim is to shed further light on the impact of people training and development in delivering service quality in Thai restaurant context, it requires an exploration of perspectives or experiences of people who relate to the studied context (Patton, 2002) Hence, qualitative approach enables the author to

draw a highly contextual picture of the phenomenon, explore "how" and "why" human

resource development happens (Barbour, 2008; Gray, 2004).Conversely, the latter approach is a measure that the researcher uses to test relationship among variables in

the phenomena setting (Saunders et al., 2009) Quantitative research can show inter-

relationship among variable within the investigated context, but for finding new insights

of how events happen, qualitative approach tends to work better (Saunders et al., 2009)

Another reason is, compared with close- ended question following quantitative research,qualitative research leads to the use of open- ended question format, which encourages informants to share what they think in relation to what they were asked

(Mack et al., 2003) The more ideas informants share, the deeper understanding researchers can have about what is going on towards the reality (Saunders et al., 2003)

As such, by using interview, the researcher could interact effectively with research participants, hear what they regarding human resource development issues in their restaurants.Since then, she obtained different views of different people towards the same research problem, then pointed out common perspectives (Bryman, 1988; Lofl and, 1971; Marshall and Rossman, 1995; Miles and Huberman, 1994)

Moreover, due to the lack of academic references regarding the role of people training and development in ethic Thai restaurants to improve service quality, according to

Maxwell (2005), qualitative research enables the author:

• Conduct investigations within the research area that is short of literature foundation

• Use literature review as a starting point to establish a conceptual framework and further investigate the topic by collecting primary data