The effect of Human Sigma model on service orientation in hotel enterprises

The employee and the customer encounter has an important place for the service production in the hotel enterprises. Therefore, the hotel enterprises make use of the customer demands as well as the experiences and thoughts while designing and evaluating the service delivery process. In addition to that, because of the property of the service given, the thoughts, experiences and needs of the hotel employees who have the same human emotions as the customers should be taken into consideration. The consideration of the opinions of the workers and the service staff will be effective in the service-oriented approach in the organization as well as the better service provision. In this context, the main purpose of this research is to explain the effect of the Human Sigma Model, which was developed by applying it to different service enterprises in the world and enables the evaluation of the opinions of employees and customers, on the service orientation. In order to examine the impact of the Human Sigma Model on service orientation in hotel enterprises, one hotel from each of the five different hotel star categories was selected in Ankara. The Human Sigma and Service Orientation (SERV*OR) scales were applied to these five hotels. The statements on these two scales had been asked to the front-line employees of hotels and the customers staying at these hotels. The data obtained from 49 front-line employees and 395 customers staying in the hotels were placed to the proper places of the related formulas of the Human Sigma Model and thus the Human Sigma values of these hotels were calculated, their places on the Human Sigma Map and the obtained results were discussed. According to the results, the a single star hotel had the lowest Human Sigma rating. Two and five-star hotels had the equal Human Sigma rating, thus they were located on the same area of the map. The Human Sigma ratings of the three and four star hotels were found to be greater than the other three hotel enterprises; therefore they were considered as the most effective companies with respect to employee- customer–company interaction. When the results obtained from the hotels are examined, it is seen that although the bond between the hotel enterprises and employees-customers are not strong, the interactions and interconnections between these last two parties are strong. After determining the Human Sigma values of the hotel enterprises and their locations on the map, a regression analysis was conducted to determine the effects of the employee and customer dimensions of Human Sigma to the service orientation. Also ANOVA, t-test, Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis tests were used to find out whether Human Sigma dimensions and service orientation are differentiated depending on the demographic profiles of the employees and the customers. After the hypotesis testing, it was found that the employee dimension of the Human Sigma effects the service orientation, but the customer dimension of the Human Sigma has no impact on service orientation. However, it was concluded that the demographic profiles of the employees and the customers affect the Human Sigma dimensions and service orientation. Keywords: Hotel enterprises, service orientation, encounter, Human Sigma Model.