The match between organizational climate for innovation and airport service quality

Abstract

The importance of organizational climate for innovation in improving airport service quality is crucial in new century’s business and tourism competition. Hence, this study looked into the role of organizational climate for innovation into airport service quality from managers and employees perspective in Senai International Airport, Johor, Malaysia. Questionnaire with 5-point likert scale was distributed among 111 respondents consisting the airport managers and personnel. Airport service quality and organizational climate for innovation were both treated as independent variables that consist of various dimensions and attributes. Comparison of the gap between importance and agreement of innovative climate was developed by amabile et al. (1996) and was employed for data analysis in this research. Result showed that six innovative climate attributes from organizational encouragement, supervisor encouragement, workgroup support, sufficient resources, challenging work, freedom, organizational impediments and workload pressure had higher importance for improving service quality, but did not exist in the airport, thus had to be fixed including recognition and award system, goal setting, trust, autonomy, and internal strife. Six other innovative climate attributes had higher existence than importance, thus were considered, including supervisor support, budgeting and resource dedication, over-challenging tasks, time pressure and realistic expectations. This study revealed the importance of certain organizational climate attribute in contributing to airport service quality. Moreover, it is crucial for airport top management to fix certain innovative climate attributes to provide subordinate with enough organizational innovative climate to contribute to service quality.