Establishing IT Service Climate as an Antecedent of IT Service Quality

The SERVQUAL scale has been used to measure the quality of IT service experienced by business customers. Recent research has extended the IT service quality research by studying the other half of the server-customer relationship, i.e., the IT department (Jia and Reich, ICIS 2005). Building from organizational climate theories, a new construct, IT Service Climate, has been proposed as an antecedent of IT service quality. This paper reports on an in-progress empirical research project that aims to 1) develop a valid measurement instrument for the IT service climate construct, and 2) test the hypothesis that IT service climate is an antecedent of IT service quality. To date, a multidimensional measurement instrument has been developed and pilot tested. Final data collection is underway to further validate the instrument and establish it as an antecedent of IT service quality. Potential contributions to both IT research and practice are discussed.