Perceived customer participation and work engagement: the path through emotional labor

Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine how service employee's perceived customer participation influences beneficial deep acting behaviors among service personnel while dampening the development of the less-beneficial surface acting, which subsequently affects service employees' work engagement. Specifically, the current research explores how the personal factors of customer orientation (CO) and employee-customer fit interact with the customer participation to ultimately develop either surface - or deep-acting behaviors. Design/methodology/approach - Data for the study were collected from a cross-sectional sample of retail bank and insurance companies in South Korea. Questionnaires were distributed to 750 frontline employees of several banks and insurance companies. Of these, 518 questionnaires were used for further analysis. Findings - The results indicate that perceived customer participation exhibits the predicted negative influence on surface acting as well as the positive effect on deep acting. Using the hierarchical moderated regression approach, the interaction effect of customer participation and CO on the service employees' surface acting was found. Finally, the positive moderating effect of employee's perceived fit with customers in the relationship between perceived customer participation and employees' deep acting was supported. Research limitations/implications - First, the specific service sectors chosen for this study are retail banking and insurance. Furthermore, the study was conducted among the frontline employees of banks and insurance companies in South Korea. Second, the study used single-source data, which are prone to common method variance. While the survey instrument was structured carefully with this in mind and the results suggested that method bias may not have been an issue in this study, this problem can best be avoided by collecting data from multiple sources. Third, this study is limited by its cross-sectional approach. The cross-sectional nature of the present study does not allow causal inferences. Practical implications - This study provides a practical implication for managers to understand the importance of customer participation for relieving the negative effects of employee emotional labor. From a practitioner standpoint, examining the relationship between customer participation and emotional labor is of great importance given the benefits and costs associated with managing customer participation. Thus, managers should magnify the positive effect of perceived customer participation on emotional labor by increasing frontline employees' understanding of customer participation. Second, the finding that CO plays a more critical role in the reduction of surface acting has important managerial implications. The recruitment and selection of frontline employees should incorporate an assessment of the level of CO. The results of this study strongly suggest that service organizations can greatly benefit from hiring individuals with a higher CO for frontline positions because CO signals a better job-person fit. Originality/value - The present study is the first to link employees' perceived customer participation with their attempts at emotional labor at work and to study how those attempts lead to work engagement. This research also shows that understanding how service employees' CO moderates the effects of customer participation on beneficial deep acting and on destructive surface acting is important in that emotional labor is a potential driver of customers' emotional states and subsequent assessments of service interaction. A third contribution of this study is the use of a new concept, which will be called person-customer fit (PCF), to reflect employees' perceived fit with customers. Although many researchers have investigated the relationship between customers and frontline employees, the research has primarily focussed on the employees' perceived fit with their organization and members of the organization and overlooked the importance of PCF.