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Introduction
There are numerous challenges facing the healthcare sector, specifically hospitals, in providing high quality services to patients. One of the main challenges is the shortage of qualified and experienced doctors and specialists. Hospitals that provide multidisciplinary and specialist services are usually overcrowded with patients. This leads to lengthy waiting time, another common challenge in healthcare service delivery ([36] Pillay et al. , 2011). These unfavourable incidents often caused the patients or visitors to have an overall unfavourable perception of the healthcare service quality. As the quality of healthcare service can significantly affect the wellbeing of patients who are ill, improving the standard of service is highly relevant to both public and private hospitals alike. There is also empirical evidence to indicate that satisfied patients are more likely to be loyal ([26] Kessler and Mylod, 2011). Delivering and sustaining service excellence is considered to be a key competitive advantage for organisations, including hospitals. An organisational culture which favours a positive service climate can lead to positive behaviors and attitudes in employees which in turn result in higher value and better results ([10] Deshpandé et al. , 1993). It has also been asserted that improvements in service culture and service quality lead to increased customer satisfaction, reduced costs, increased profitability and market share ([16] Garvin, 1984; [42] Sureshchandar et al. , 2001; [3] Anthony et al. , 2002) as well as the overall competitiveness of firms ([39] Shenawy et al. , 2007).
In order to achieve service excellence, it is essential to have employees who believe in delivering excellent service and who engage in behaviours geared towards superior service performance. In other words, building a culture of service excellence is necessary for healthcare excellence ([15] Frey et al. , 2006). Nevertheless, empirical research on the service culture and quality practices of the healthcare sector is still lacking ([1] Abdul Manaf, 2005). A noticeable gap in the literature is the lack of a comprehensive, reliable and valid measurement tool to measure the culture of service excellence. This is important to hospital managers because such a tool will service as a diagnostic instrument to better understand and measure the service culture and practices of hospitals, thereby providing insights to managers in terms of performance management, resource allocation...