Rapport-Building Behaviors Used by Retail Employees

The rapport between employees and customers represents a particularly salient issue in retail businesses characterized by significant interpersonal interactions. Although rapport relates significantly to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and word-of-mouth communication, the behaviors employees use to develop rapport receive minimal attention in marketing and management literature. Using research on rapport-building behaviors identified in other literature as a basis for investigation, this study investigates the extent to which such behaviors are relevant in commercial settings. With the critical incident technique, the authors identify rapport-building behaviors commonly used by retail employees in 388 service encounters. Analysis of 824 rapport-building behaviors described in these encounters confirms three categories suggested by previous research - uncommonly attentive, common grounding, and courteous behavior - and identifies two additional categories that have not been linked to rapport in retail settings, namely, connecting and information sharing behavior. The authors conclude with a discussion of managerial and research implications.     

How uncivil customers corrode the relationship between frontline employees and retailers

This study investigates the effects of customers’ uncivil treatments on frontline retail employees’ emotions, deviant behaviors and relationship with the retail organization. Our theoretical model is based on both marketing and personnel management literatures. 415 frontline retailing American employees answered our questionnaire. Employees treated uncivilly by customers feel angry but have to hide their negative emotions, which leads them to emotional exhaustion and deviant behaviors. Paradoxically, employees’ strong commitment to their retailing organization brings about more deviant behaviors. We propose some managerial strategies to cope with uncivil customers, as well as future research on this important and under-researched topic.     

Navigating contradictory logics in the field of luxury retailing

When designing luxury retail experiences, luxury managers are often encouraged to focus on a single logic: the logic of distinction. Evidence suggests, however, that multiple logics influence the field of luxury retailing. In this paper, we explore the implications of such multiplicity, focusing particularly on logics coming into tension with one another. Our research questions are: 1) What are the logics that come into conflict in luxury retail settings and 2) How can luxury retail managers navigate conflicts between logics to facilitate positive customer experiences in luxury retail settings? Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the luxury field, we find conflicts mainly between three logics: distinction, pragmatism, and hedonism. We show that each logic is underpinned by different values, different linguistic practices, and different focal objects. We further find that conflicts between the logics tend to become acute during specific interactions during the customer journey. Our findings also suggest that since luxury boutiques are by and large designed to enforce the distinction logic, luxury retailers at times struggle to accommodate and navigate the conflicts that occur between these logics. We identify three interrelated sets of practices, collectively referred to as experiential hybridization, that effectively allow luxury retailers to address the challenge of logic complexity. Theoretically, our research helps illuminate institutional logics as a factor that informs customers’ experiences in contemporary retail fields such as luxury. Managerially, we suggest ways for luxury retailers to manage logic conflict and deliver superior customer experiences.     

Can sales leaders with humility create adaptive retail salespersons?

Although humility in leadership has been recognized as vital in leading salespeople to cope with unpredictability and unknowability in customers, the role of sales leader humility in promoting sales behaviors has remained underexplored. Our research aims to unfold how and when sales managers’ leadership humility nurtures retail salespersons’ adaptive selling behavior. Grounded on the dataset from managers and employees working in retail shops of a large telecommunication and computer company in Vietnam, the results reveal the role of retail salespersons’ customer knowledge, adaptive self-efficacy, and customer-oriented harmonious passion as the mediation paths for the linkage between sales leader humility and retail salespeople's adaptive selling behavior. The findings further provide evidence for the role of sales managers’ adaptive selling as an enhancer for the impacts of sales leader humility on these mediators.     

The Interplay of Emotion Regulation and Sales Experience in Salesperson Conflicts: Evidence from an Emerging Economy

ABSTRACT

It is human nature that personal interactions are often charged with emotions and laden with conflicts. Workplace encounters are not immune from this reality. Despite this, few studies have examined ways to reduce interpersonal conflict in the workplace. This study examines the interpersonal impact of emotion regulation on salesperson relationships with stakeholders. Using structural equation modeling, results of the analysis showed that salesperson's regulation of emotions was negatively related to interpersonal conflict with co-workers as well as with customers; and positively impacted customer-oriented sales behaviors. The results also support the moderating role of selling experience in the relationship between emotion regulation and interpersonal conflict with customers. That is, the negative relationship between regulation and conflict with customers is stronger for salespeople with lower sales experience. These findings put forward important managerial implications with regard to the recruitment and training of sales professionals.     

How retail entrepreneurs perceive the link between surveillance,feeling of security,and competitiveness of the retail store? A structural model approach

This study seeks to create a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which retail entrepreneurs perceive the link between surveillance and customers’ and employees’ sense of security at the store level. This study also analyzes the link between customers’ and employees’ sense of the security and store's competitiveness from the viewpoint of retail entrepreneurs. The present study utilizes elements of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) in its theoretical approach. The population for the study consisted of 946 grocery store K-retail entrepreneurs. The data collection was carried out through an Internet survey in February and March 2009. A total of 161 grocery store retailers filled in the questionnaire, yielding a response rate of 17%. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). The study revealed that formal surveillance has a negative impact on customers’ feelings of security from the retailers’ point of view. In contrast to formal surveillance, informal surveillance had positive impacts on customers’ and employees’ feelings of security. Retail entrepreneurs perceived that both customers’ and employees’ feeling of security had a positive impact on the store's competitiveness.     

The Language Backfire Effect: How Frontline Employees Decrease Customer Satisfaction through Language Use

Extant marketing research holds that customers prefer frontline personnel to speak the customers’ first language. Furthermore, current managerial practices instruct frontline employees to either use the customers’ first language or, in international settings, to use English. Through five studies in different retail and service contexts, we identify situations where the opposite is true. The results of the first two studies suggest that if customers initiate contact in a second language, the frontline employee’s switch to the customer’s first language constitutes an identity threat leading customers to feel less satisfied; an effect we term the language backfire effect. Our third study extends these results to a domestic context to test for the impact of linguistic acculturation on how immigrant customers perceive frontline employees’ language switch. The fourth study replicates the findings in a real-life retail context. These results present a paradox for marketing research: although frontline employees switch to customers’ first language to accommodate them, these actions might not have the desired consequences. Having identified and described the problem of the language backfire effect, our final study introduces and verifies a managerially actionable solution: combining the language switch with a language proficiency compliment offsets the language backfire effect.     

The multichannel customer’s service experience: building satisfaction and trust

Multichannel retailers dominate today’s retail landscape. Practitioners and researchers are particularly interested in understanding how the multichannel strategy helps establishing and developing relationships with customers. Our findings, from 302 customers of multichannel financial services firms, show that frontline employees’ customer facilitation behaviors (traditional channel) have a stronger impact on satisfaction than e-psychological benefits (derived from the company’s Web site), while their positive influence on trust is not significantly different. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Non-normal simultaneous regression models for customer linkage analysis

Simultaneous systems of equations with non-normal errors are developed to study the relationship between customer and employee satisfaction. Customers interact with many employees, and employees serve many customers, such that a one-to-one mapping between customers and employees is not possible. Analysis proceeds by relating, or linking, distribution percentiles among variables. Such analysis is commonly encountered in marketing when data are from independently collected samples. We demonstrate our model in the context of retail banking, where drivers of customer and employee satisfaction are shown to be percentile-dependent.      

Between a rock and a hard place: Seizing the opportunity of demanding customers by means of frontline service behaviors

Service businesses are increasingly facing more demanding customers as a result of a shift in power from the service providers' side to the customers' side. Related literature predominantly examines the negative side of this ongoing trend, while overlooking the positive side. The major aim of this paper is to examine how frontline employees — investment account managers — deal with the ongoing increase in customer demandingness. To address this, we draw on adaptability performance theory to test the facilitating effect of frontline employees' post-transaction service behaviors (SBs) — diligence, inducements, information communication, sportsmanship, and empathy — as a means of adaptation to higher levels of customer demand. Findings indicate that frontline employees adapt most of their SBs' intensities to match customers' demands. The results show that some SBs actually increase the effectiveness and efficiency of frontline employees' service performance, leading to an increase in customer value and satisfaction. Customer value is found as a mediator in some of the relationships between SBs and customer satisfaction. Contrary to the conception of the negative outcomes of customer demandingness, service firms need to consider taking advantage of customer demandingness by stressing the role of frontline employees in adapting to customers’ demands.     

An Eye for an Eye Will Make the Whole World Blind: Conflict Escalation into Workplace Bullying and the Role of Distributive Conflict Behavior

The current study investigated how work-related disagreements—coined as conflicts—relate to workplace bullying, from the perspective of the target as well as the perpetrator. We hypothesized a positive indirect association between task conflicts and bullying through relationship conflicts. This process accounted for both for targets and perpetrators of bullying. Targets are distinguished from perpetrators in our assumption that this indirect effect is boosted by distributive conflict behavior, being yielding for targets and forcing for perpetrators. Results in a large representative sample of the Flemish working population (N = 2,029) confirmed our hypotheses. Additionally, our study also revealed a direct effect from task conflicts to bullying in the analyses regarding the indirect as well as the conditional indirect effects. For perpetrators, both the indirect and direct relationships are moderated by forcing, underlining the importance of distributive conflict behavior particularly for the enactment of bullying behaviors.     

Quality and productivity: role conflict in the service context

This article presents a qualitative study exploring service employees’ experiences of quality–productivity tensions in the workplace, and how they cope with such conflicts. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 50 service employees. Content analysis suggests that organization-level conflict derives from the different channels that service organizations use to convey the importance of quality (e.g. training) and of productivity (e.g. rewards) to employees. During service interactions, employees experience conflict when standardization is violated and productivity is threatened. Our results demonstrate and explain employees' strategies for coping with the conflict between productivity and quality and with the ‘double message' they receive about these two goals. Many of these strategies are intended to ensure quality while maintaining productivity. We discuss the study's contribution to service science, and explain existing organizational mechanisms and processes for communicating the importance of quality and productivity to employees. Implications for service management are discussed.     

Care management to improve retail customers' and employees’ satisfaction

In retailing, ongoing management is needed to avoid compromising customer relationships and organizational performance because of consumers' or employees' dysfunctional behavior. This paper contributes to understanding how care management strategies can improve in-store experiences for customers and employees by adapting the Chronic Care Management (CCM) theory to retailing. Across two studies, one on customers (Study 1) and one on retail employees (Study 2) we show that empowerment reduces dysfunctional behavior, enhancing satisfaction. Furthermore, we demonstrate that customers' and employees’ emotional bond with the retailer (i.e., store attachment) moderates the relationship between dysfunctional behavior and satisfaction, buffering dissatisfaction from dysfunctional behavior.     

Change-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors: the direct and moderating influence of goal orientation

Organizational learning in a retail setting relies on the motivation of boundary-spanning retail associates to identify and implement organizationally functional changes with respect to work methods, policies, and procedures within the context of their jobs, stores, or organizations-referred to as change-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). A theoretical model of situation and person antecedents of change-oriented OCBs is developed and tested with a sample of 183 full-time boundary-spanning employees of a national retail sales organization. The results reveal that learning goal orientation and leader-member exchange quality are direct positive antecedents of these behaviors. The results also demonstrate interesting Person × Situation interactions. Direct relationships between transformational or contingent reward leadership behaviors and change-oriented OCBs are moderated by employee performance goal orientation. A positive relationship between organizational commitment and change-oriented OCBs is moderated by employee learning goal orientation. Contingent reward leadership and transformational leadership behaviors also have indirect positive relationships with change-oriented OCBs via leader-member exchange quality.     

Does emotional labor moderate customer participation and buying?

Two studies examined whether employees’ emotional labor as perceived by customers, moderates the relationship between customers’ participation and money spent. In Study I, 30 in-depth interviews were conducted with customers to examine participation during shopping as well as customers’ awareness of their service employees’ behaviors. The interviews revealed two types of customer participation: emotional engagement and physical effort. Based on Study I, Study II investigated 114 customers, and the moderating role of perceived employees’ emotional labor on the relationships between customer participation and spending money. Even when customers were highly involved in the purchasing process, they spent less money when they observed employee inauthenticity as manifested in Surface Acting. However, Deep Acting positively moderated the relationship between customer participation and spending money. These findings help shed light on the circumstances in which customer participation is strengthened (leading to greater spending) or weakened.     

The Relationships Among Manager-, Employee-, and Customer-Company Identification: Implications For Retail Store Financial Performance

Based on the premise of an interpersonal “chain of influence” with respect to organizational identification, we posit a relationship between company managers, employees, and customers with respect to organizational identification with the retailer. Specifically, we hypothesize that the level of a store manager's identification with the retailer is positively related to the level of their store employees’ identification with the retailer, which in turn is positively related to the level of customers’ identification with the retailer, which results in increased levels of store financial performance. We investigate these relationships using data from 306 retail stores within a single retail chain.     

Furthering Organizational Priorities with Less Than Truthful Behavior: A Call for Additional Tools

Though codes of ethics exist in many businesses, employees still view less than truthful behaviors to be a significant ethical problem. The current study examines the related and somewhat counterintuitive issue of less than truthful behaviors intended to further organizational priorities. Such behaviors risk violating one organizational priority (e.g., adhering to a code of ethics) to achieve another. Data indicated four unique though non-mutually exclusive motivations: (1) to avoid confrontation or conflict; (2) to ensure quality in the delivery of a product or service; (3) to buy time for an organization’s strategy to play out; and (4) for self-protection or self-enhancement. The evidence further suggests that enhanced managerial training, particularly in handling confrontation and conflicts, could reduce the contradiction between stated codes of ethics and actual behaviors.     

From overt to covert: Exploring discrimination against homosexual consumers in retail stores

This research examines discrimination against homosexual consumers in several stores located in a Colombian shopping mall. Further, this research assesses retail conditions in Colombia, which is dealing with conflicts arising from issues related to its legalization of same-sex marriage. In the past, homosexual consumers experienced overt discrimination from retail employees typically in the form of finger pointing, negative stares, laughing, and refusal of service. This research reveals that overt discrimination against homosexual consumers seems to have abated across several indices, primarily in terms of waiting time for assistance from employees. The data reveal that gay male and lesbian couples remain susceptible to covert discrimination by retail employees, compared with their heterosexual counterparts, typically in the form of negative glances, refusal of service, and laughter. This research reveals that homosexual consumers may not realize the full value potential of marketplace exchanges, despite the waning of overt discriminatory practices by retail employees.     

Ethical Problems, Conflicts and Beliefs of Small Business Professionals

This paper presents the results of a national study of the beliefs and perceptions of small business professionals concerning ethics within their company and business in general. The study examined their views on the relationship between success and ethical conduct as well as the extent and nature of ethical conflicts experienced by the respondents. Some comparisons are made with similar studies that have been conducted in the past. Respondents have the most ethical conflicts with customers and employees, and with regard to honesty in contracts/agreements. Most also believe that ethical standards are lower than they were 10 and 20 years ago, primarily because society's moral standards are lower. Additionally, they believe that the behavior of top management has the most influence on decisions in ethical situations. Finally, consistent with prior studies, they believe that they have the most responsibility to customers, ahead of employees and stockholders.     

Game on: Engaging customers and employees through gamification

Managers are frequently tasked with increasing the engagement levels of key stakeholders, such as customers and employees. Gamification—defined as the application of game design principles to change behavior in non-gaming contexts—is a tool that, if crafted and implemented properly, can increase engagement. In this article we discuss how gamification can aid customer and employee engagement, and delineate between four different types of customers and employees who act as ‘players’ in gamified experiences. We include illustrative examples of gamification and conclude by presenting five lessons for managers who wish to utilize gamification.