The Antecedents of Prosocial Service Behaviours: An Empirical Investigation

Frontline employee attitudes and behaviours during service encounters influence customers' perceptions of service quality. For this reason, the identification of variables that influence service behaviours is important. Much remains unknown about the factors affecting service behaviours in service settings. This study investigates service employees' attitudinal (job satisfaction and organisational commitment) and behavioural (prosocial service behaviours) responses to management strategies (internal communication, professional development and empowerment). One hundred and eighty-eight service employees contributed data, which were analysed using a structural modelling methodology. The authors found that management strategies influence service behaviours directly but the mediating role of job attitudes is not supported.     

Employees' overestimation of functional and relational service quality: A gap analysis

This study extends previous research on gap analysis of service quality by including not only functional service quality but also relational benefits. To this end, a field study was carried out in 36 hotels and 35 restaurants. The samples consisted of 213 employees and 657 customers. A questionnaire format was used to measure both functional and relational service quality, as well as customers' loyalty. When comparing employee and customer perceptions, gaps potentially range from ‘overestimation’ (employees' perceptions are greater than customers' perceptions) to ‘underestimation’ (customers' perceptions are greater than employees' perceptions). In general, the results indicated that the employees surveyed overestimated the service quality they offer to customers, although gaps were greater for certain service attributes than for others. In addition, some gaps were more related to customer loyalty than others. The findings also showed that employees' overestimation of relational benefits plays a moderating role, increasing the negative relationship between employees' overestimation of functional service quality and customers' loyalty. The theoretical and managerial implications of the results are discussed further in this paper.     

The authentic service employee: Service employees' language use for authentic service experiences

This study analyzes how service employees' language use influences the authenticity of a service. The extant service literature on language use remains exclusively focused on the customer's perceptions of first language use in direct communication. Shifting the focus to the service employee, this paper posits that language could exert a wider influence, contributing both to how customers perceive the authenticity of the service and the entire service experience. Analyzing language use in service encounters, the paper addresses this research gap in the literature from the perspective of the service employee. In many service settings, authenticity is an important part in customers' construal of their experience. The study analyzes how service employees in British pubs outside the UK may use English with local customers who frequent these pubs to get a taste of Britain and British culture, contributing to the service literature by introducing a typology to align the service employees' language use with authenticity to strengthen the customer experience. The paper further contributes to service theory by extending the understanding of service sabotage by showing how, why, and in which circumstances service employees may use a language switch to sabotage the customer experience. Finally, the study extends the extant human resources literature on the effects of allowing service employees to be themselves to show that this managerial practice not only benefits the service employees also results in a more authentic customer experience.     

Climate perceptions and the customer orientation of frontline service employees

Satisfaction of customers' needs is particularly dependent upon the customer orientation of frontline employees. Understanding the drivers of such orientation is, therefore, a key issue in current research. Research relating perceptions of organisational values with the customer orientation of employees is rather sparse. This topic is approached by investigating the role of selected dimensions of psychological climate in promoting the customer orientation of frontline service employees. A structural equations model is developed and empirically tested, indicating that perceptions of customer, ethical, and innovation climates exert an indirect effect on the adoption of customer-oriented behaviours by frontline employees.     

Emotional labor in a non-isolated service encounter - The impact of customer observation on perceived authenticity and perceived fairness

Emotional labor is a frequently discussed topic in the service literature because of its varying effects on customers' evaluation processes. Previous research has primarily investigated the effects of emotional labor from an employee-customer perspective. This article considers customer copresence and argues that the observed interaction between an employee and another customer affects the focal customer's evaluation process. An extended customer-employee-customer model is presented and empirically tested in a pharmacy setting. The findings show that distinctive emotional labor affects customers' perceptions of authenticity and fairness. This study presents a more nuanced account of the effectiveness of emotional labor and provides managers with advice to enhance point-of-sale interactions.     

Exploring the relationship between individual values and the customer orientation of front-line employees

Abstract

Because of the nature of services, namely the inseparability of production and consumption, employee behaviours influence customer perceptions of service quality and satisfaction with the service provider. In particular, customer-oriented employees seek to help customers by addressing their needs, and this contributes to the building of customer satisfaction and the development of a relationship. Not surprisingly, research has been investigating the drivers of employees’ customer orientation. This paper examines how individual values influence the customer orientation of front-line service employees, a topic that has been unexplored in extant literature, and this is useful for the selection of employees who match the firm’s service strategy. To accomplish this, the study relies on the Schwartz value theory, which is applied to front-line employees in banking. The findings indicate that both resultant conservation and resultant self-enhancement affect the customer orientation of employees, and that these effects are moderated by job satisfaction and autonomy.     

Measuring Service Quality in the Public Utilities

Based on a synthesis of the services marketing literature, a multiple-item perceived service quality measure is developed The instrument is a practical tool for monitoring residential customers' quality perceptions of the services provided by a public utility firm (electric, gas and water services). The measure exhibits excellent internal consistency reliability, and meets a number of slringent criteria for construct validity. Implications for researchers and potential users of the scale are discussed.     

Productivity and Effectiveness in Service Firms

Service firms are facing pressures which are leading them to seek increases in productivity. While attempts to increase productivity in goods-producing organisations seldom affect customers, such attempts in service firms are very likely to impinge upon customers' perceptions of the service. The need for service firms' marketing personnel to be involved in the assessment of the impact of attempts to raise productivity is thus clear. Furthermore, the need to assess the impact of increases in productivity on the firm's effectiveness rather than in traditional efficiency terms is emphasised.     

Explaining consumer complaining behaviour in double deviation scenarios: the banking services

Research has shown that more than half of attempted recovery efforts only reinforce dissatisfaction, producing a ‘double deviation’ effect. Surprisingly, these double deviation effects have received little attention in marketing literature. The crucial question is what happens after these critical encounters, which behaviour or set of behaviours the customers are prone to follow and how customers' perceptions of the firm's recovery efforts influence these behaviours. For the analysis of choice of the type of response (no action, complaining, exit, and complaining and exit), we estimate ordered probit models. The results of our study show that the magnitude of service failure, recovery strategies, distributive and procedural justice, recovery-related emotions and satisfaction with service recovery have a significant effect on customers' choice of the type of response, the latter showing the highest impact. Implications from the findings are offered.     

Assessing Service Quality in Korean Casual-Dining Restaurants Using DINESERV

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to validate the five dimensions of DINESERV and evaluate service quality of foreign-brand, casual dining restaurants in Korea using DINESERV. It was hypothesized that DINESERV is a valid instrument in the Korean culture, and service quality differs significantly based upon customers' characteristics and restaurants. The factor analysis indicated that (1) tangibles had three subdimensions, and (2) responsiveness had a substantial overlap with assurance. Restaurants in the chain displayed significantly different service qualities. Gender, average spending, and dining occasions significantly impacted the perceptions of service quality.     

Employee encouragement of self-disclosure in the service encounter and its impact on customer satisfaction

In the service encounter, the employee must often encourage customer self-disclosure (i.e., revealing of personal information) to be able to match the customer's needs with what the firm has to offer. This study uses an experimental approach to manipulate employee encouragement of self-disclosure (low vs. high) to explore its impact on the customer. It was found that encouraging self-disclosure enhanced customer perceptions of customization, employee effort, own effort, privacy concerns, and employee humanness, and that these responses influenced customer satisfaction. In addition, because many firms are beginning to replace human employees with various forms of virtual agents (and it has been argued that we humans may find it less threatening to self-disclose to such agents), the identity of the employee (virtual agent vs. human employee) was manipulated, too. The identity factor, however, did not influence customers' responses.     

Measurement of Customer Perceptions of the Retail Bank Service Delivery System

The purpose of this research was to develop measures of concepts related to retail bank customers' perceptions of retail bank services delivery systems. The results of the research indicate four potentially important aspects of the retail bank services delivery system are (1) general bank personal service, (2) teller personal service, (3) reactton capacity , and (4) location convenience. The research results support the hypotheses that retail bank customers' perceptions of these issues may be related to customer satisfaction and intentions to do business with the bank in the future, intentions to purchase additional products and services, and intentions to give the bank a larger percentage of the customer's business.     

Effects of face masks and photo tags on nonverbal communication in service encounters

Facial expressions convey critical information for customers to evaluate a service encounter. Widespread mask-wearing since the pandemic began has brought challenges in decoding individuals' facial expressions. This study investigates the effects of face masks on customers' interpretations of frontline employees’ facial expressions across retailing and healthcare service contexts. The findings show that mask-wearing improves customer perception of service employees and behavioral intention when the employees display neutral or negative emotions. Photo tags, as an additional nonverbal signal, can enhance the positive perceptions of masked employees. This research suggests that service companies could incorporate face masks and photo tags as a cost-effective practice to improve service encounters beyond the current pandemic.     

Part-time restaurant employee perceptions of management practices: An empirical investigation

The UK hospitality industry increasingly relies on part-time rather than full-time employees to provide more flexible and cost-effective operations with potential trade-offs for service quality. Part-time employees can be divided into two distinct groups – permanent and temporary – each with very different employment rationales. This study compares full-time and part-time employee perceptions of management practices across twelve Cardiff-based restaurants using a self-administered questionnaire. There were significant differences between full-time and part-time employees but no difference between temporary and permanent part-time employees who were equally dissatisfied with management practices, job attitudes and job behaviours. The qualitative data showed the two part-time employees' sub-groups had different needs. Despite this they were treated as a homogenous group by managers. Lack of management understanding of part-time staff impacts on how they are treated and ultimately on service quality and customer satisfaction.     

Examining the consequences of customer-oriented deviance in retail

Retail employees sometimes breach company rules and policies in order to assist their customers. Referred to as customer-oriented deviance (COD), the phenomenon is defined as intentional behaviours that depart from the norms of a referent group in honorable ways. While researchers have begun to examine the important organisational contributions that positive deviance delivers, there have been calls to develop a better understanding of the direct and indirect consequences of such behaviours. Accordingly, conceptual model was tested on a sample of 390 frontline service employees, elucidating the complex relationships between COD behaviours, self-perceptions of service quality and organisational commitment intentions. The current research also examines the moderating effect of gender on these complex relationships. The model offers a strong psychological explanation of how an employee's COD behaviours impact on their self-perception of their service reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy, which leads to greater overall commitment to the organisation. This research also finds an employee's gender moderates several of these relationships. The work offers practitioners insight into the important role of employee empowerment in service organisations. The research calls for further empirical examinations of COD behaviours, including antecedents and the mediating roles of perceived risk and tenure.     

Pleasantly Plump: Offsetting Negative Obesity Stereotypes for Frontline Service Employees

Obesity is described as the fastest growing public health challenge facing developed nations (Prentice, 2006). This research introduces the topic of obesity to the retailing literature by examining the interplay between obesity in frontline employees and customer evaluations of service transactions. Baseline effects are established that show customers evaluate employees and firms more negatively if the frontline worker is obese compared to average weight. Two follow-up studies identify means by which firms may offset the negative obesity effects. Specifically, signaling theory is drawn upon in Study 1 to justify the introduction of observable quality cues as a means to offset negative stereotypes. Results indicate that the presence of unambiguous quality cues attenuate unfavorable judgments of the obese employee and the affiliated retail store. In Study 2, a countervailing, jovial stereotype is primed as a means to offset the more prominent negative ones. Retail managers can use this research as a means to understand an important caveat to frontline service evaluations and as the basis for managing a prominent negative stereotype.     

Leveraging employee emotional intelligence in casino profitability

Drawing on the link between service quality and casino profitability, this paper describes the roles of frontline employees in delivering casino service quality and analyses how management can nurture employee emotional intelligence's (EEI) contribution to casino revenue growth. This study is conceptual in nature. The analysis builds from identifying the emotional contents embracing service encounter involving casino frontline employees and customers. The identification area approaches from emotional work performed by employees, referred to as emotional labor, the emotional service delivered by casinos, customer attributed emotions and emotional contagion. The study comprehensively analyses how EEI can manage and regulate emotionally charged service encounters which subsequently affect customers’ perception of employee behaviours and service performance over service encounters. These encounter performance forms customers’ perception of casino service quality which leads to customer loyalty and ultimately casino profitability. This theory-focused study presents an additional venue with great potential for casinos to enhance business performance and financial growth, as well as providing new insights into the role of EEI in organizations for researchers in the relevant field.     

Service Orientation: Its Impact on Business Performance in the Medical Service Industry

From the viewpoint of internal marketing, employees who are content in their job may be motivated to satisfy their customers better than ones who are not content. Another relevant premise is that the content employees, because of their work motivation, would eventually help improve the performance of their firm. To verify these relationships, some previous studies looked into the effects of organisational service orientation on employee's satisfaction. But only few of them investigated the mediating effects of variables such as service value and customer orientation for their role in linking service orientation to business performance. This study examines how an organisation's service orientation had an effect on its performance at hospitals. For this purpose, verification of the mediating role of service value perceived by employees as well as the role of customer orientation on the firm's performance was attempted. For this study, a total of 292 usable questionnaires were collected from hospital staffs located in metropolitan cities of Korea. The hypotheses concerning relationships among service orientation, service value, employee satisfaction and customer orientation were verified by covariance structural modelling, using SPSS 10.0 and AMOS 4.0 programs. The result is as follows. First, organisational service orientation had a positive effect on both employee satisfaction and service value perceived by hospital staff. Second, employee satisfaction had a positive impact on service value and customer orientation. Finally, service value as well as employee's customer orientation were found to exert positive influence on the medical firm's performance.     

How Employees’ Perceptions of CSR Increase Employee Creativity: Mediating Mechanisms of Compassion at Work and Intrinsic Motivation

This study aims to examine how service employees’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) affect their creativity at work and its mediated link through compassion at work and their intrinsic motivation. Working with a sample of 250 hotel employees in South Korea, structural equation modeling is employed to test research hypotheses. The results of this research suggest that employees’ perceptions of CSR are positively related to employee creativity. Second, compassion at work mediated the positive relationship between employees’ perceptions of CSR and creativity. Third, employees’ intrinsic motivation also mediated the positive relationship between employees’ perceptions of CSR and employee creativity. Finally, the relationship between employees’ perceptions of CSR and employee creativity is sequentially and fully mediated by compassion at work and their intrinsic motivation. The theoretical and managerial implications of the results and limitations of the study are discussed, and future research directions are suggested.     

Assessing primary healthcare services quality in Spain: managers vs. patients perceptions

This paper measures the perceptions of the service quality by both the users and the health centre managers in Spain. With this information, it was possible to calculate the size of Gap-6, proposed by Lewis of discrepancy among the customers' perceptions and the perceptions of health centre managers. Using factor analysis and multiple regressions, significant associations were found between the service quality dimensions and patient satisfaction. Implications and future research issues are discussed.