The development and empirical evaluation of a service quality model in selected hotels in Owerri, Imo state Nigeria

Abstract

Service quality is an important metric which helps in distinguishing between successful and unsuccessful hotels. The purpose of the present study was to answer the question: what is the influence of ethical leadership and job satisfaction on, trust, work life balance, work engagement, and turnover intention on service quality among employees in selected hotels in the Nigerian Owerri Imo state Tourism sector? 500 questionnaires were distributed to the participants and 271 questionnaires were completed. The participants were hotel employees working in the Nigerian Owerri Imo state tourism sector. Convenience sampling was used to collect the data. Each of the respondents completed the SERVQUAL questionnaire for measuring service quality (Parasuraman et al.,1988); a six-item TIS-6 scale developed by Bothma and Roodt (2013) to measure turnover intention; the 13-item Leader Trust Scale (LTS) with 11 items developed by Bews (2000) and two items were adopted from the Workplace Trust Survey (WTS) developed by Ferres, Connell and Travaglione (2004) to measure trust; 17 items Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) developed by Schaufeli and Bakker (2003); the Job Satisfaction Scale (JSS) (Warr, Cook, & Wall, 1979); a 15-item instrument developed by Fisher-McAuley et al. (2003) to measure work life balance; and the Leadership of Ethics Scale (LES) by Engelbrecht and Heine (as cited in Heine 2013) for measuring ethical leadership.