A Bibliometric Analysis: The Influence of Service Profit Chain (SPC) on the Hospitality Industry

Abstract

In the hospitality industry, the service-profit chain establishes relationships between profitability, customer loyalty, employee satisfaction, loyalty, and productivity. It shows that focusing on employee engagement and customer satisfaction might boost a company's financial performance. This relates to how well the company supports and assists its employees. Several studies have empirically investigated the relationship between practices in the service profit chain and their impact on the tourism and hospitality industries. The service profit chain is based on the premise that market leadership requires an emphasis on managing value drivers that are the most important determinants of success: employee retention, employee satisfaction, and employee productivity, which have the greatest impact on success and provide the most benefit to customers. Bibliometric studies that organize production in this field, however, are still scarce. The study's goal is to analyze the influence of service profit chain practices in hospitality industry using VOSviewer software that is related to marketing. This will be achieved by analyzing articles published on the SCOPUS platform to determine state-of-the-art trends and other relevant indicators. Researcher obtained a sample of 57 materials for analysis. The author processed the data and used the VOSviewer software to graphically illustrate the results. The study examines country-wise productivity, most productive source titles, most-cited sources on the topic, top-most keyword occurrences, and yearly productivity research output trends in this area. The study findings indicate that the United States, China, Australia, Germany, India, Egypt, Malaysia, and Brazil are the most productive countries in the field of research output on the topic. The investigation also reveals that the top-most source title on the topic is “International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management,” and frequently used keywords are "articles,” “customer satisfaction,” and “service profit chain." On this topic, the USA is the leading country. However, research on the service profit chain and hospitality in Asia has shown that South Korea and China are the most successful countries in this field. Only the SCOPUS database contains the study's findings. The study's findings are useful for academicians, researchers, and policymakers looking for answers to the topic.