This study aims to bridge the research gap in the topic of the quality of public services in Palestine due to the importance of this issue locally and internationally and provide recommendations to the heads of the public service institutions to address the numerous obstacles and improve the quality of the services provided to the potential customers The problem of this research deals with the lack of the interest of the civil service employees in the quality of the services they offer to their customers. Primary observations showed that these employees tend to provide ambiguous information to their customers. This results in recurrent visits to the civil service centers to acquire the simple requested service. Numerous are the cases where the human dignity of the customers was not respected by the civil service employees Other cases were observed where the customer was left waiting for a long time, during which the employees showed no respect for the unjustified loss of time. To achieve the purpose of the study, the researchers have developed a new scale (PPSQM Scale) that measures five standards: the communication skills of the public servant, the level of friendliness and empathy offered, avoiding corruption and nepotism, maintaining customer dignity, and the services’ duration of time. Consequently, 600 questionnaires were distributed to six public service institutions. The study concluded that the interest in the quality of public services is low and less attention is paid to the time taken in offering the service. The heads of these institutions attributed the inconvenience of the services to: work pressure, lack of resources, and the prevalence of some behaviors concerning nepotism and corruption.

Authors
Nour Hatem Mattou, Jehad Yousif Alayasa
Keywords
Service quality
communication standards
time standards
dignity standards
financial and managerial corruption standards
public institutions
Pages
184-216
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