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The overall growth of the service economy and increased competition among service providers has forced organizations to focus on the quality of services they provide ([34] Liao, 2007). Thus, a widespread consensus that "satisfied customers are power" has spread widely, including into the healthcare industry ([18] Drach-Zahavy, 2009). In response, managers must create work environments that support service quality, by developing a positive "service climate" ([50] Schneider et al. , 2009), in which employees share the perception that providing high quality service is what really counts ([53] Schneider et al. , 2002). Empirical research consistently finds positive relations between service climates and quality service behaviors ([16] Dimitriades, 2007; [43] Salanova et al. , 2005). Considering the importance of a service climate as a means to provide both the motivation and the capability to exhibit quality service behaviors ([34] Liao, 2007), this field study focuses on the concept of a service climate, including its antecedents, its moderators, and its consequences.
Prior literature in this realm suffers from two key gaps. First, scholars have only recently begun to investigate the antecedents of service climate ([43] Salanova et al. , 2005), focusing mainly on the role of leadership ([48] Schneider et al. , 2005) and organizational structure ([14], [15] de Jong et al. , 2004, 2005). The unit's structure provides the bridge between a leader's strategic decisions and the arrangements required to implement the strategy. We therefore focus on important structural factors as antecedents of the service climate, namely, the joint effects of unit-level task and goal interdependence. The former refers to shared perceptions of how much unit members believe that they depend on other unit members' resources, information, support, or assistance to carry out their job ([7] Brass, 1985). The latter pertains to unit members' shared perceptions of how much they believe that they are assigned group goals or provided with group feedback ([63] van der Vegt and Janssen, 2003). We provide theoretical arguments and empirical support for our claims that goal interdependence relates positively to service climate and that task interdependence moderates their link (Figure 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.]).
Second, [53] Schneider et al. (2002) highlight the importance of studying not only the service climate level of a certain setting (aggregation of individual...