Abstract

Quality management initiatives represent visible parts of public administration reforms and modernizations. It is now rare for a government statement about public services not to mention the idea of ‘improvement’ and, often in the same breath, of ‘quality’ (Gaster and Squires, 2003). Through- out the 1980s, both applied and academic researchers focused on service quality attributes in order to operationalize the customer satisfaction construct (Allen, 2004). The aim to uncover the general, universal services attributes that contribute most significantly to relevant quality assessment has been apparent particularly in research in private sector organizations. In recent years, there have been some attempts at verifying the usability of the attributes and the tools based on them to measure the quality of public services (Lukášová, 2008). Although Czech central government has not been passive in the promotion of quality management in general, neither in public administration, and Czech territorial self-governments (municipalities and regions) have been implementing various quality management instruments (particularly EIPA’s CAF, Local Agenda 21, BSC, or ISO norms) for several years (Špaček, 2009), the Czech academia has not given sufficient attention to the understanding of the “quality” in the administrative context. The paper deals with the term quality within the context of Czech municipal offices. It presents the results of qualitative part of a more complex research project and focuses on the quality criteria as perceived by employees of municipal offices.