Service providers' use of emotional competencies and perceived workgroup emotional climate to predict customer and provider satisfaction with service encounters (original) (raw)
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Journal of Service Management
Purpose Customers often experience negative emotions during service experiences. The ways that employees manage customers’ emotions and impressions about whether the service provider is concerned for them in such emotionally charged service encounters (ECSEs) is crucial, considering the criticality of the encounter. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, this study proposes that two key competencies – employee emotional competence (EEC) and employee technical competence (ETC) – affect negative customer emotions and customer satisfaction with employee response in ECSEs. Design/methodology/approach This study relies on a video-based experiment that depicts a customer involved in an ECSE as a service provider delivers bad news to him. The hypothesis tests use a two-way independent analysis of covariance. Findings Both emotional and technical competencies must be displayed to improve the customer experience in an ECSE. When EEC is low, ETC does not decrease negative customer emotions or...
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2018
Emotional expressions have a pervasive impact on organizational behavior. However, it is unclear how such effects are modulated by the intensity of emotional displays. We investigated in online, laboratory, and field experiments how varying intensities of service providers' emotional displays (expressed through text, intonation, or physical displays) influence customer service outcomes. We show that in mundane service interactions, displays of intense happiness or sadness are interpreted as inappropriate and inauthentic, and lead to reduced trust in the service provider. We further demonstrate the mediating effect of trust on satisfaction with the service (Study 1), expected satisfaction with the product (Studies 2 and 3), and actual product use (Study 4). The studies highlight perceptions of appropriateness and sincerity as mechanisms underlying the interpersonal effects of emotional intensity. We propose that emotional intensity be incorporated in theorizing and research on organizational behavior to arrive at a more complete understanding of emotional dynamics.
Linking service employees' emotional competence to customer satisfaction: a multilevel approach
Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2008
This study investigates the role of the Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) concept of emotional competence for the effective management of participants' affect in service encounters and customers' assessments about the encounter. We developed and tested a two-level model in which service employees' emotional competence is related to both service employees' and customers' state positive affect. Customers' positive affect, in turn, is related to customers' specific and general evaluations of the service rendered. A total of 394 service encounters involving 53 financial consultants of a bank were assessed. Data were analyzed by a combination of path analysis and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), and the results support large parts of the model. More specifically, employees' emotional competence was related to customer evaluations through their own positive affective state during the encounter as well as through a direct link to the customer evaluations of the encounter.
Journal of Service Research, 2015
Customers often experience intense emotions during service encounters. Their perceptions of how well contact employees demonstrate emotional competence in emotionally charged service encounters can affect their service evaluations and loyalty intentions. Previous studies examining employees’ potential to behave in emotionally competent ways (i.e., employee emotional intelligence [EEI]) have used self- or supervisor-reported scales to predict customer outcomes, presenting EEI as stable and independent of the context. However, service firms should be more concerned with the actual display of emotionally competent behaviors by employees (employee emotional competence [EEC]), because employee behaviors vary across encounters. Moreover, a customer perspective of EEC is useful, as customer perceptions of employee performance are crucial predictors of satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, this study proposes a conceptualization and operationalization of EEC in a service encounter context. O...
… and Morality (Research on Emotion …, 2007
The current paper draws on leadership theory (e.g., Avolio, Bass & Jung, 1999; Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995) and recent theories of emotions in organizations. Its aim is twofold: first, to understand how leaders affect followers' emotional experiences, and second, to chart the ways in which followers’ different emotional experiences affect their ability to maintain satisfactory service interactions with customers and to further influence customers’ emotions. We outline a theoretical framework suggesting that leaders can have a proximal effect on followers' emotional experiences and a distal effect on customers' emotional and service experiences. More specifically, we argue that leaders' behavior (i.e., transformational leadership) can affect followers' emotional experiences (i.e., emotional labor and bounded emotionality). This reduces followers' sense of emotional exhaustion and enables followers to display positive affectivity toward customers. These displays then elicit positive emotions among customers. This chapter presents theoretical guidelines that combine notions from a number of related areas of studies on emotion in organizations. More specifically, it is aimed at shedding light on the effects leaders (i.e., managers) have on different types of emotional experiences in their followers (i.e., employees). These different types of emotional experiences in organizations (i.e., emotional labor and bounded emotionality) have received limited or no attention to date in the leadership literature. By applying several recent concepts from the emotion literature jointly, a more in-depth picture can be obtained of the ways in which they interact to effect followers' emotions and behavior and related service outcomes. This more comprehensive exploration and understanding of the underling processes of emotional influence should ideally also promote greater emotional well-being among service employees and improve customer service interactions.
The Role of Emotions in Service Encounters
Journal of Service Research, 2002
This study contributes to the services marketing literature by examining for mundane service transactions the impact of customer-displayed emotion and affect on assessments of the service encounter and the overall experience. Observational and perceptual data from customers were matched with frontline employees in 200 transaction-specific encounters. The results of this study suggest that consumers' evaluations of the service encounter correlate highly with their displayed emotions during the interaction and post-encounter mood states. Finally, the findings indicate that frontline employees' perceptions of the encounter are not aligned with those of their customers. The managerial implications of these findings are briefly discussed.
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2010
This paper assesses the impact of the service worker's display of emotions (i.e., one aspect of functional service quality) on customer satisfaction under the conditions of different levels of technical service quality by means of an experimental approach (N =600), in which display of emotions (unhappiness vs. happiness) and technical service quality (poor vs. good) were manipulated. The results indicate that the impact of the service worker's emotional display behavior on customer satisfaction is contingent on the level of technical service quality, in the sense that customer satisfaction is affected only when technical service quality is good rather than poor. Encouraging a positive display (e.g., by a smile policy), which many service firms do, is thus not a panacea for improved customer satisfaction. The moderating effect is explained in terms of service encounter congruency, which influences the mediated process by which emotional displays by service workers come to affect customer satisfaction.
Effects of perceived employee emotional competence on customer satisfaction and loyalty
Journal of Service Management, 2013
Purpose-During service encounters, it has been suggested that emotionally competent employees are likely to succeed in building rapport with their customers, which in turn often leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, these relationships have not been empirically examined. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effects of customer perceived employee emotional competence (EEC) on satisfaction and loyalty. The paper also examines how and to what extent rapport mediates these effects. Design/methodology/approach-Drawing on the theory of affect-as-information, suggesting that emotions inform human behavior, the paper develops a structural model and tests it on a sample of 247 customers in a personal service setting. Findings-Customer perceptions of EEC positively influence customer satisfaction and loyalty. Rapport partially mediates both effects. Practical implications-The extent to which customers perceive employees as emotionally competent is related to the development of rapport, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. Managers of high-contact services should therefore pay attention to emotional competence when hiring new employees, and/or encourage and train existing employees to develop this type of competence. Originality/value-Previous studies have used employee self-reports or supervisor reports of EEC, both of which have significant limitations when used in service encounters to predict customer outcomes. Furthermore, they essentially capture an employee's potential to behave in an emotionally competent way while service managers are interested in the actual display of emotionally competent behaviors as perceived by customers. Accordingly, to overcome these issues, this study adopts a customer perspective of EEC and uses customer perceptions of EEC to predict customer outcome.