Beyond Satisfaction: Engaging Students and Faculty in a Romanian Business School

Abstract

This paper aims at explaining the faculty-student encounter from a new paradigm on service quality management that combines the traditional views of relationship marketing and human resources management with new research findings. Due to the rising importance of educational services with its impact on both the development of society as well as on the development of individual careers, ensuring a high-quality education can be achieved by adopting a perspective that views students as customers of a service organization that is in the business of transferring, developing knowledge as well as innovation. When managing knowledge-service encounter, one must take into account the fact that a major factor for something to go wrong is human nature, which dominates the encounter. One of the approaches for managing the engagement of the faculty-student encounter is the HumanSigma model which uses the irrationality and volatility of human nature in order to strategically align management of customers and employees. The paper proceeds in the following manner: first, the impact of quality in educational services is explained; second, the patterns of engagement are presented; third, a case study, based on an applied research on a Romanian School of Management is offered.