Özet:

The article aims to better understand the impact of intercultural communication competence on personal interaction and customer satisfaction in grocery retail industry. The study explored three major constructs namely intercultural communication competence, personal interaction which is one of the important variables for service quality and customer satisfaction of major grocery retail outlets (e.g. supermarkets and hypermarkets) in Klang Valley area, Malaysia. The customer based approach methodology was adopted and the data was collected using structured questionnaire survey. The measurement of the constructs and their interrelationships were examined based on structural equation modelling approach. Based on the proposed framework, a number of propositions were developed to facilitate empirical research on intercultural communication competences of staff comprises of inter-role congruence and interaction comfort as perceived by customers of the selected grocery retail outlets. This contributes to the development of a theory based path model, which links the intercultural competence to service quality and customer satisfaction. Although numerous researchers have studied the extensive topic of service quality and customer satisfaction, none of those studies explored on the critical role of intercultural communication competence and integrated the construct in their service quality and customer satisfaction model. As intercultural notions are becoming acknowledged as crucial to success particularly in multicultural society, an inclusive dimension of the key determinants of the factor should improve our understanding of this phenomenon and provide an impetus for future research.

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