Impact of Intercultural Competence on Service Reliability and Customer Satisfaction in the Grocery Retailing

The article aims to better understand the impact of intercultural competence on reliability that is one of the variables of service quality and customer satisfaction in grocery retail industry. While numerous scholars have considered the extensive subject of service quality and customer satisfaction, they have not explored on the critical role of intercultural competence in their framework. The present study explored the interrelationships between three major constructs namely intercultural competence, reliability and customer satisfaction of major grocery retail settings (e.g. supermarkets and hypermarkets) in Malaysia. Based on a structural equation modeling, a number of propositions were established to facilitate empirical investigation on intercultural competences of the selected grocery retail outlets in Malaysia. This contributes to the development of a theory based path model which links the intercultural competence to service quality and customer satisfaction. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.