مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Competition between airlines has recently become more severe with the service quality of airlines receiving more attention than ever before. High-quality service has become a de facto requirement for this industry (Park et al., 2004), as it helps companies gain and maintain customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention (Hu et al., 2009). However, following the recent global economic downturn, most airlines are struggling to survive and are forced to reduce their costs and services as much as possible (Liou et al., 2015), making it imperative for airline managers to figure out how to improve service quality at a minimum cost. As a result, strong employee policies in air transport have become very crucial for delivering highquality service.

Our study regards that family-supportive organization perceptions (FSOP) might play a key role in understanding strain symptoms and high-quality service. Some research studies have talked about service quality in Asia’s airline industry, but they just concentrate on tangible antecedent variables such as physical environment and access quality (Wu and Cheng, 2013), or the outcomes of service quality such as loyalty (Chen and Hu, 2013) and passengers’ behavior intentions (Park et al., 2004). They seldom look into the psychological aspect to discuss how airlines’ policies affect psychological conditions and how employees’ psychological conditions influence high-quality service. Therefore, our study fills the gap to examine how FSOP, through the mechanism of strain symptoms, influence service quality. This study is timely in providing a greater understanding of the key antecedent factors for service quality by helping to plan future policies of the airline industry.

To improve our understanding of service quality in air transport, this paper takes the affective events theory (AET) as the theoretical foundation to support our framework. Moreover, we establish a model that simultaneously considers FSOP, psychological detachment, need for recovery, emotional exhaustion, and service quality, as Fig. 1 shows.