Long-term/ Short-term orientation

The cultural dimension of long-term orientation is found to be correlated with other service quality dimensions in different ways among studies. Kueh et al. (2007) suggest a positive correlation between this dimension and all of five SERVQUAL dimensions, whereas Tsoukatos et al. (2007) find only Reliability is positively correlated with long-term orientation. In Furrer et al. (2000)‟s study, the situation is more sophisticated when long-term orientation is positively correlated with Reliability and Responsiveness while negatively correlated with Assurance and Tangibles. In the scope of this thesis, long-term orientation is proved to be positively correlated with Tangibles, Assurance, Reliability and Empathy in the healthcare context, that is quite similar to Kueh et al.

(2007)‟s study result. However, in the education context, there is not any correlation relationship supported between long-term orientation and other SERVQUAL dimensions.

In terms of healthcare context, this thesis results point out the positive correlation relationship between long-term orientation and four SERVQUAL dimensions of Tangibles, Assurance, Reliability and Empathy. This result supports hypothesis H24a featuring Reliability, which is also confirmed by all of the three reference studies.

Tsoukatos et al. (2007) explained that as long as the service is reliable, long-term

oriented customers will not attach much importance into other SERVQUAL dimensions. However, based on the results of this thesis, these customers who pay much attention to the long-term health condition after being treated by the doctors rather than the short-term one, especially when health problem may not be finished at a given moment with the disease relapse. Thus, they will focus on all service quality dimensions except for Responsiveness. It can be explained that long-term oriented customers are generally patient and relationship-oriented, so they can forgive the mistakes during the process or long waiting time for the longer-term purpose of proper cure. Among the four dimensions, Assurance, not Reliability, has the highest correlation with long-term orientation, of about 0.4, which implies that customers rely much on the reputation of doctors or clinics because healthcare service quality is hard for them to define and to measure. In other words, the clinic needs to provide customers with trust and Assurance as the most important thing.

In the education context, interestingly and inversely, long-term orientation is not correlated with any SERVQUAL dimension. In order to explain this situation, there could be two reasons. Firstly, long-term oriented people focus on long-term goals as well as success. However, a success at the age of 30s, 40s or even 50s cannot be attributed to university education only, but rather the working experience, support from families, trainings throughout jobs and so on. Secondly, Hofstede et al. (2010:261) state that people from long-term orientation tend to attribute academic success to one‟s own effort and failure to one‟s lack of it instead of the lecturers‟ knowledge and experience, university‟s facilities and buildings and so on. However, it does not mean that long-term oriented customers do not expect anything from the university. They have different expectations for the education service quality even when they all share the same cultural trait of long-term or short-term orientation. In other words, the importance of the service quality dimension of a customer could not be evaluated based on his Confucian dynamism dimension, but on his other cultural dimensions.

6.3.6. Indulgence

As mentioned above regarding the lack of research in this field for the cultural dimension of Indulgence, there will be no direct comparison between this thesis results with other studies‟ results, just the implications from the work of Koc et al. (2017). In terms of healthcare service, indulgence is found to have positive correlation with the SERVQUAL dimensions of Reliability. This result contradicts the ex-ante supposition that indulgent customers with their optimism as well as intrinsic happiness, do not need reliability from the service provider. Instead, these customers do not want to limit their desires or wants, so they will perform more search, analysis or information collection to ensure their service experience as suggested by Koc et al. (2017). Therefore, the service providers in healthcare need to provide extensive information throughout vast communicative and advertising channels. In this case, Reliability of the service is linked to the source of useful information the customers are able to search and to receive from the service provider.

However, in the context of education, the results show that there is no correlation between the sixth dimension and any SERVQUAL dimension which is very intriguing.

Some people in our modern society criticize indulgence as the negation of hard work, but some advocate it as a way to foster one‟s mind optimistically for continuous effort and development. All of these concepts and terms are associated to the education environment. In contrast to the clinic environment, a university is linked to an optimistic image where students can both work hard and enjoy different social activities with various networks. The view of the university will be different between the indulgent and restraint students. For instance, an indulgent student may expect for Empathy because he would like to have the care for his entertainment or social activities whereas Empathy is also needed as a care such as tutor or academic support for a restraint student who focus on working hard on study. In other words, because higher education has the ability to serve for different purposes of the students at the same time, expectation for each of these purposes can intertwine. Thus, it is hard to find the correlation between the cultural dimension of Indulgence and SERVQUAL dimensions.