The Relationship between Librarians' Communication Skills and Service Quality: Professional Ethics as a Mediator

Professional ethics and communication skills of staff are effective in service quality. The purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating role of professional ethics in relation to communication skills dimensions and service quality.

This study is applied and descriptive. Also, this research is correlational using structural equation modeling. The population of the study consisted of staff and clients of public libraries of East Azarbaijan province. 200 employees and 1,000 clients (5 clients for each employee) were selected using the Krejcie & Morgan sampling table and simple random sampling. Then, questionnaires were distributed among them. In this research, researcher-made questionnaires of professional ethics with 8 items, communication skills with 26 items and 5 components and quality of service with 10 items were used. These tools were based on Cadozer's professional ethics (2002), Queendom communication skills (2004), and LibQual service quality (2003) Questionnaires, and their reliability coefficients were 0.79, 0.82 and 0.87, respectively. Data were also analyzed using structural equation modeling test and AMOS software.

The mean score of communication skills, professional ethics and quality of services of the staff of public libraries in East Azarbaijan were 3.59, 3.22 and 3.54, respectively. Also, there is a significant relationship between the variables of professional ethics and skills of insight into the process (β=0.22, t=3/99), relationship with certainty (β=0.13, t=2/23), ability to receive and send messages (β=0.15, t=3/76) and listening (β=0.21, t=3/84). In addition, there was no significant relationship between the variables of librarian's professional ethics and the quality of their service (β=0.47, t=7/42). Also, the results of structural equation modeling test showed that the proposed model regarding the relationship between communication skills, professional ethics and quality of service employees of public libraries has a goodness of fit (RMSEA=0.052، CFI=978، GFI=0.972).

The present study is the first to investigate the relationship between three variables of professional ethics, communication skills and service quality using structural equation modeling. Overall, it can be said that communication skills and professional ethics are the essential skills of employees that can affect the quality of service provided. Accordingly, in the process of hiring in various office positions having communication skills and ethics must be considered as factors affecting organizational processes and service quality by managers and planners. Conducting training, interpersonal communication and professional ethics keep up to date public librarians and will be effective.