The Interaction Effect of Service Employees’ Emotion Display and Gender on Customer Responses: The Service Environment’s Role (An Abstract)

Abstract

Drawing on emotional labor theory (Hochschild 2006), this study examines the impact of service employees’ emotion display (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2006) and gender (Hochschild 2006) on customer responses while considering customers’ service environment perception (Turley and Milliman 2000) as a moderator. The context of a hotel check-in counter was used to experimentally examine whether service employees’ emotion display and gender influence customer responses in terms of satisfaction, quality perception, and loyalty considering customers’ service environment perception as moderator. Using a 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial design, we manipulated service employees’ emotion display (smiling vs. non-smiling) and service employees’ gender (male vs. female). Respondents, who were randomly assigned to one of the four conditions, received a scenario that described a hotel check-in counter and asked them to imagine being a guest in this hotel. Additionally, they were either exposed to a photograph (Bateson and Hui 1992) showing a smiling or non-smiling service employee who is male or female. Moreover, the photograph provided respondents with an impression of the interior design (Homburg et al. 2005) and the consistent visual presentation (Simoes et al. 2005) of the hotel’s interior design (i.e., the check-in area). Afterward, respondents were requested to complete a post-encounter questionnaire including measures of satisfaction, quality perception, loyalty, and service environment perception as well as manipulation checks and sociodemographics. The results show that smiling service employees increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and quality perceptions. Non-smiling service employees lead to less favorable customer responses. In interaction with the service employee’s emotion display, the service employee’s gender becomes significant in certain conditions. Specifically, while service employees’ gender does not have a significant impact under the condition of a smiling service employee, a non-smiling service employee results in less negative responses if it is male versus female. Customers’ positive service environment perception negatively moderates the proposed relationship of service employees’ emotion display and customer responses and, thus, compensates the negative effect of non-smiling service employees. The study advances our understanding of service employees’ emotion display and gender in service interactions by considering customers’ service environment perception. Important management implications can be derived from the results of this study. First, service employees should display positive emotions. This means that marketers should introduce specific trainings to ensure that service employees are able to display a genuine smile. Our findings show that it is accepted for male frontline employees to display both negative and positive emotions. Women, however, need to only display positive emotions, and thus, specific personnel development programs for women might be necessary. Due to the moderating role of customers’ interior design perception, marketers are proposed to focus on a nice store design and consistent visual presentation of the hotel.