Users’ Satisfaction as a Measure of Organisational Effectiveness in Service Organisations: A Study Based on Special and Academic Libraries

Abstract

Organisational effectiveness has become a vital issue today, in view of large investments made in organisations and role played by them in the development of various sectors of society, Generally, attempts are made to study the effectiveness of profit making organisations where performance can be measured in terms of profit or sales, but less attention is devoted to the study of assessment of service organisations like libraries where no such concrete indicator to measure effectiveness is available. The present study has been undertaken with a view to find out the factors that can be adopted as measure effectiveness in library organisations and the factors that contribute to their effective functioning. The data have been collected from 203 employees, 200 users and 30 supervisors through different questionnaires and from organisational records from the fifteen academic and special libraries in Delhi. The data have been processed through different statistical techniques. The results of the study indicated that the consumers’ satisfaction, employees’ job satisfaction and the group performance variables can be adopted as measures of performance of service organisations like libraries. The study also investigated into the relationship among different dimensions of the Users’ satisfaction scale and made interesting revelations regarding the role of consumers’ (users’) background factors in influencing the satisfaction derived by them from the services rendered by library organisations.