Quality standards and competitive advantage: the role of human issues in tourism organizations

This paper aims to analyze the relationship between internalization (heterogeneous adoption) of quality standards, human issues and competitive advantage using 407 organizations in six tourism subsectors: hotels and tourism apartments, travel agencies, restaurants, rural accommodation, beaches and tourism information offices. The results contribute to expand the previous studies about the effects of internalization of quality standards on operational and business performance by considering other effects related to human issues (training, motivation and involvement of employees). It also contributes to extend the results of these previous works by showing the effects of internalization on competitive advantage, and the role of human issues in the case of tourism organizations.This work was supported by Spanish government (National R&D&i Plan) [grant number ECO2012-36316]