Competitive priorities in Malaysian service industry

This study attempts to explain the components of competitive priorities of Malaysian service firms and to find out the competitive priorities of different service industries in Malaysia, and how these competitive priorities change across “low performance” and “high performance” service industries.

An empirical study of 254 firms from nine different service industries is conducted to answer the objectives of this study.

Four competitive priorities are identified: cost, quality, delivery and flexibility. Six service industries namely fast food, hospital, retail store, bank, private college and accountant industries are found to be focused on quality while three industries namely hotel, auto‐repair and architect prioritized delivery. For both high performance and low performance firms, quality remained the top competitive priority followed by delivery, flexibility and cost.

This is the first study that identifies competitive priorities in the Malaysian service sector