Cultural influences on service quality expectation: evidence from Mongolian high education

Abstract

Universities' goal in the twenty-first century is threefold: knowledge generation, utilization, and sharing. In education, students are clients who pay to interact with institutions in order to gain knowledge and skills. To boost national competitiveness, university education should be the primary system for training and equipping people to be highly skilled, creative, inventive, and professional. As a result, assessing the quality of education services becomes critical. The study topic in this context will be how to adequately quantify service quality while taking cultural factors into account. This research will employ SERVQUAL and HOFSTEDE dimensions to explore the two concepts of service quality and culture because they are the most widely used models in their industry. The key research issue based on this problem is how culture effects service quality in a certain service context and how service quality expectations fluctuate across different types of service contexts and cultures. With the rise of online education caused by the covid19 pandemic, students from different countries and diverse cultural backgrounds seek to learn from university or instructors located in other parts of the world. These university and instructors need to understand learners’ cultural differences to provide quality education services. This makes the link between culture and service quality expectation of utmost importance. In the case of education context, Power distance has a stronger correlation with reliability and assurance. The following conclusions can be drawn from this: Mongolia has a high "power distance" culture, therefore, in the field of Mongolian education, graduates are trained to be skilled professionals, as well as job security and demand for graduates is important.