Scenarios involving dental services investigate whether Asian cultures are similar enough to allow
standardization of service offerings. The authors control and manipulate levels of service quality and
performance to yield a 2 ×2 experimental design, with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean subjects (N= 637)
selected to test the invariance of the measures. The findings yield significant cultural differences with the
Chinese respondents perceiving significantly higher service quality and expressing greater customer
satisfaction when performance is high and expressing less customer satisfaction when performance is low
than do the Japanese and Korean respondents. Thus, even though all three countries are considered highcontext cultures, having their roots in Confucianism, differences in national culture lead to the conclusion
that “one size does not fit all” in terms of service offerings.