Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that influence the affective commitment of nursing staff and its subsequent impact on their job performance. Design/methodology/approach – A survey-based study was performed among 349 nursing staff working in Uttarakhand, randomly selected from six public healthcare institutes, using a well-established questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was applied to study the mediating effect of affective commitment and its correlation with the constructs used in research. Findings – The findings of the study revealed that the level of burnout is significantly higher among the nursing staff and had an inverse relation with affective commitment. Further, perceived organizational support and procedural justice showed a positive relation with affective commitment in contrast to burnout. Moreover, affective commitment had a strong impact on job performance of the nursing staff, indicated by direct relation with a value of 0.70. Research limitations/implications – The findings contribute by recognizing the various factors affecting the performance of nursing staff specifically in developing country like India. Limited in geographical area, industry and a self-rated questionnaire are some of the limitations of the present study. Practical implications – To conclude, this study revealed the vital significance of factors affecting the job performance of nursing staff through affective commitment. Based on the findings, healthcare institutions need to reduce the level of burnout, create and enhance a supportive and fair working environment to enhance the level of affective commitment and consequently the job performance of the nursing staff. Originality/value – This study has extended the existing literature by identifying the mediating role of affective commitment on factors affecting job performance of nursing staff specifically in the Indian context.

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Customer engagement can be used as a proxy in customer behaviour research for evaluating customer relationships towards a company and/or brand. Companies are increasingly recognizing the value of establishing close customer relationships. The objective of the research was to explore the associations among customer engagement dimensions and loyalty for evaluating customer relationships in hotel industry. Furthermore, the study evaluated the level and influence of new customers and repeat customer segments. The questionnaires were completed by 240 customers from five star hotels (30% customers) and four star hotels (70% customers) in Jammu and Kashmir, India. Descriptive, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and regression analysis were used to test the constructs. The results suggested that customer engagement (CE) makes a substantial contribution to the prediction of loyalty in building customer relationships. The findings proposed that hoteliers can actively incorporate strategies to enhance CE, which eventually develops a sustainable loyal customer relationship. The results could be effective to hoteliers in engaging customers while marketing, branding, differentiating and segmenting its products and services in building loyal customer relationships. Moreover, segmenting the customers offers a deeper and more inclusive knowledge of nature of customer relationships and how engagement can be fostered and developed among diverse customer segments.

Market orientation is a business perspective that makes the customer the focal point of a company’s total operation. Market-oriented firms seek to understand customers’ expressed and latent needs and develop superior solutions for those needs. It is an organizational culture that most effectively and efficiently creates the necessary behaviour for the creation of superior value for buyers and thus continuous superior performance for the business. The research idea stems from academic findings that market orientation not only affects the performance of the concern directly but also indirectly. The study is based on primary research. Data has been collected from top management executives, employees and customers of different automobile showrooms. The scales have been purified and validated with the help of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results of structure equation modelling (SEM) revealed a significant relationship between market orientation and business performance. The indirect effects of market orientation on business performance through employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction have been explored, which yielded significant results.

Developing nations have been focusing on relevant infrastructure, technology, disease control, and health outcomes in terms of deaths and disability-adjusted life years, largely ignoring the service quality aspect from the patient's viewpoint. However, researchers opine that real improvement in quality of care cannot occur if the user perception is not involved. Patients' perception is significant as it impacts their ‘health-seeking behaviour’ including utilization of services, seeks involvement in issues directly related to them, enables the service provider to meet their expectations better, and provides relevant information to the policy makers to improve the quality. Some studies conducted in the recent years have made attempts to develop multi-dimensional scales and measure quality of healthcare services in the developing nations. The current study seeks to assess the perception of patients towards quality of healthcare services in rural areas of seven districts of Uttar Pradesh based on the scale developed by Haddad et al (1988) after making adjustment for Indian culture and language. 500 patients were contacted at the healthcare centres. A response rate of 79.2 per cent was obtained resulting in 396 complete questionnaires. The 23-item scale employed in the study comprised five homogeneous sub-scales and tested well for reliability. The findings illustrated some interesting differences in user perception regarding service quality and how they varied between different healthcare centres and according to the demographic status of patients. It was observed that: ‘Healthcare delivery’ and ‘financial and physical access to care’ significantly impacted the perception among men while among women it was ‘healthcare delivery’ and ‘health personnel conduct and drug availability’. With improved income and education, the expectations of the respondents also increased. It was not merely the financial and physical access that was important but the manner of delivery, the availability of various facilities and the interpersonal and diagnostic aspect of care as well that mattered to the people with enhanced economic earnings. What was most astonishing was the finding that the overall quality of healthcare services is perceived to be higher in Primary Healthcare Centres than in Community Healthcare Centres (CHCs). Inadequate availability of doctors and medical equipments, poor clinical examination and poor quality of drugs were the important drawbacks reported at CHCs. The current study demonstrates that the instrument employed was reliable and possessed the power to discern differences in the opinion of people on the basis of demographic factors and point out the quality differences in different healthcare centres. It could be employed to evaluate healthcare quality perception in other rural and urban regions of the country and to assess the perception of users towards private healthcare centres. Further, research could be conducted on price-quality relationship. The government and policy makers are urged to consider the perceptions of patients as well in order to affect improvement in the quality of services and subsequently increase their utilization.