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The role of climate: implications for service employee engagement and customer service performance

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Abstract

This research attempts to challenge the resource–engagement and engagement–performance linkage of the job demands–resources model by testing these links under the moderating role of two climates: performance-focused and service failure recovery. Two studies test a model on the boundary conditions of the linkages across four service industries. The results suggest that whether a resource (i.e., self-efficacy and job autonomy) positively or negatively affects engagement depends on whether (1) a climate is appraised as a challenge or hindrance demand and (2) a climate is deemed a complementary or compensatory resource. Using multi-respondent data from customer service employees and their supervisors in the health care industry, Study 1 conceptualizes climate as organizational climate and finds that performance-focused climate strengthens (weakens) the positive effect of self-efficacy (job autonomy) on engagement while service failure recovery climate weakens the positive impact of self-efficacy on engagement. Study 2 generalizes the findings from Study 1 and provides broad support by testing the model using psychological climate in the financial services, tourism and hospitality, and retailing industries. This study closes with a configuration approach to climate research by discussing when multiple climates can co-exist under different types of resources.

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Notes

  1. Engagement refers to employee job engagement hereinafter, unless specified otherwise.

  2. Other organizational climates that we identified were safety and innovation. However, these two climates were emphasized more for physicians and nurses than for service employees, who were the focus of this study.

  3. We argue that the ability to effectively implement a service failure recovery strategy is an important criterion of a self-efficacious service employee. Therefore, we assert that when employees possess self-efficacy, they feel competent in addressing customer complaints or service failures as part of their job description.

  4. A confidentially agreement with the company prevents us from revealing any further information about the chain and its hospitals’ operations.

  5. We measured social desirability (Cronbach’s α = .89) with a five-item, six-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 6 = strongly agree) taken from Donovan et al. (2004).

  6. Previous researchers have treated “climate” variables as a resource or demand, testing it at the individual (Schmitz and Ganesan 2014) or group (Dollard and Bakker 2010) level. The current study takes into account within-group (i.e., shared) perceptions of performance-focused climate and service failure recovery climate.

  7. Considering the central role of individual appraisal of job demands and resources in JD-R theory, this study takes into account service employees’ own perceptions of performance-focused climate and service failure recovery climate. In other words, we operationalized the two climate variables at the service employee (or individual) level.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, Kadir Has University, 34083, Istanbul, Turkey

    Bulent Menguc

  2. Marketing Division, University of Leeds, Leeds University Business School, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

    Bulent Menguc & Constantine S. Katsikeas

  3. Thunderbird School of Global Management and Center for Service Leadership, Arizona State University, Glendale, AZ, 85306, USA

    Seigyoung Auh

  4. College of Business Administration, Department of Management, University of Sharjah, P.O. Box 27272, Sharjah, UAE

    Volkan Yeniaras

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  1. Bulent Menguc
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  2. Seigyoung Auh
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  3. Volkan Yeniaras
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  4. Constantine S. Katsikeas
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Correspondence to Bulent Menguc.

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Martin Mende served as Area Editor for this article.

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Table 8

Table 8 Measures and results of CFA
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Menguc, B., Auh, S., Yeniaras, V. et al. The role of climate: implications for service employee engagement and customer service performance. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 45, 428–451 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-017-0526-9

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