HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AND SERVICE QUALITY - REFERENCE TO PRIVATE HOSPITALS IN SRI LANKA

Abstract

The human resource management practices, which play a central role in the exchange relationships between the organisation’s management and its employees, are connected to every stage of the employment circle, and through these engagements employees obtain valuable information about the organisation and the way it is managed. These activities show employees, in practice, what is valued in general, and how the organisation views them in particular. When employees deal with customers they bring to the interaction their perceptions of human resource management practices. This might have an effect on service quality. The marketing discipline defines quality as meeting or exceeding the expectations of customers and the customer satisfaction is driven through high service quality. Increased levels of competition have compelled many health care organisations to learn how to differentiate themselves and consequently, assessments of service quality have become critical for hospitals. This research undertaken from Patients’ and Human Resource Manager’s points of view to find out the impact of human resource management practices on service quality in the private hospitals. A survey was conducted with 75 Human Resource Managers of the private hospitals and their 745 customers. The researchers used SPSS 16.0 to analyses the data. The study concluded that the human resource management practices have impacted on service quality at a high level of human resource manager to the patients of private hospitals and resulted that the five human resource management practices accounted for 93.7% of the variation in service quality, while the 6.3% of variation was unexplained by these variables.