Perceived customer participation and work engagement

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Perceived customer participation and work engagement: the path through emotional labor Jaewon Yoo Department of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Soongsil University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

The path through emotional labor 1009 Received 17 September 2015 Revised 6 December 2015 20 December 2015 Accepted 4 January 2016

Downloaded by Sejong University At 22:20 25 September 2016 (PT)

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

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2014S1A5A8012663).

International Journal of Bank Marketing Vol. 34 No. 7, 2016 pp. 1009-1024 © Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0265-2323 DOI 10.1108/IJBM-09-2015-0139

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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. Keywords Customer orientation, Work engagement, Emotional labour, Perceived customer participation, Perceived fit with customer Paper type Research paper

Introduction Most organizations have implicit or explicit requirements concerning which emotions employees express and how and when they express them. These requirements are seen as more central in jobs that entail high levels of interaction with customers, such as customer-service roles. When people regulate or manage their emotions in exchange for a wage, they are said to be undertaking emotional labor (Heffernan et al., 2008; Totterdell and Holman, 2003). Emotional labor can be defined as the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display for a wage (Hochschild, 1983). The vast majority of published empirical studies on emotional labor involve service jobs. Service jobs engender emotional labor. The distinguishing characteristics of services, as compared with manufacturing, include intangibility, heterogeneity, perishability, and co-production. The involvement with customers, especially the simultaneous production and consumption of the service, results in the need for displaying appropriate emotions and, thus, for emotional labor. Co-production means that the service itself cannot be produced separately from the customer. Moreover, the production of the service is assisted by the customer’s participation (Bailey et al., 2001). Customer participation is a required but voluntary behavior of customers for a service company. Customer participation is provided during the interaction between customers and service employees. Thus, frontline employees are beneficiaries of customer participation and may perceive customer participation positively. For example, Yoon et al. (2004) suggests that, from the employees’ perspective, customer participation in a dyadic interaction encounter is an important human factor that can influence employees’ work efforts and emotional states, such as job satisfaction. Thus, customer participation can be a sign of a relationship investment for a long-term relationship. Research on emotional labor has mostly focussed on negative outcomes for employees (e.g. Hochschild, 1983) with a few exceptions (e.g. Wharton, 1993). Emotional labor has been characterized as more likely to involve an emotional cost than an emotional benefit. If there is customer co-production in the service encounter, it implies that there may be emotional benefits to the service employee that are associated with the interaction. As such, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how customer participation influences beneficial deep acting behaviors among service personnel, while dampening the development of 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 customer participation to ultimately develop either surface or deep acting behaviors. The personal elements included in this study represent a realistic combination of potentially helpful components from a service employee’s perspective, including variables that are largely unique to a service role. Figure 1 depicts the framework for this study.

The path through emotional labor

Customer orientation

H5 (–)

H6 (+) Surface acting

H1 (–)

H3 (–)

1011 Work engagement

Customer participation Deep acting

H2 (+)


H7 (–)

H4 (+)

H8 (+)

P-C Fit

A primary contribution of the research is that 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. 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 (Henning-Thurau et al., 2006). 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. However, when we consider the boundary-spanning role of the service employee, perceived fit with the customer is another important factor for understanding service employee behavior. Back ground theory Emotional regulation model Recent service-management research has increasingly focussed on the role of emotions in service delivery, particularly the emotional labor performed by service employees. Most organizations have implicit and explicit requirements concerning which emotions employees express and how and when they express them. Service employees are expected to display certain emotions (e.g. happiness) and suppress others (e.g. anger) in their daily interactions with customers to comply with their job requirements and organizational expectations (Groth et al., 2009). When employees regulate or manage their emotions, they are said to be undertaking emotional labor. Since Hochschild (1983) introduced the concept, most research on emotional labor has focussed on its definition and dimensions. Hochschild (1983) defines emotional labor as “invoking or suppressing personal feelings in order to display appropriate job related emotions in an attempt to yield customer responses” (p. 7). Grandey (2000) views emotional labor as the process of regulating both feelings and expressions for

Figure 1. Research model and hypotheses

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organizational goals. Others (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993) suggest that emotional labor is the act of displaying appropriate emotion (i.e. conforming to a display rule). Most emotional labor conceptualizations suggest that, to display appropriate emotions at work, individuals must sometimes hide or fake felt emotions (surface acting) or try to experience the desired emotion (deep acting). In deep acting, employees endeavor to express authentic emotions, and though not every attempt succeeds, emotions expressed as a result of deep acting are more likely to be authentic than those expressed through surface acting, which occurs when employees only change their outward emotional display without genuinely altering how they actually feel (i.e. they are “faking”). In surface acting, frustrated employees may suppress their frustration and simply smile at an annoying customer, thus “putting on a mask” without actually changing their feelings and expressing feigned rather than genuine emotions (Grandey, 2003; Groth et al., 2009). An important social, psychological, and theoretical underpinning of deep and surface acting strategies comes from the concept of emotional regulation (Côté, 2005; Grandey, 2000). According to Eisenberg et al. (2000), emotional regulation is the “process of initiating, maintaining, modulating, or changing the occurrence, intensity, or duration of internal feeling states […] in the service of accomplishing one’s goals” (p. 137). Emotional regulation encompasses a broader set of behaviors, whereas emotional labor represents a specific type of emotional regulation (Côté, 2005). The model proposes that there are two main types of emotional regulation involved in emotional labor: antecedent-focussed and response-focussed regulation. Grandey (2000) likened these two types, which she adopted from Gross’s (1998) process model of emotional regulation, to Hochschild’s (1983) concepts of deep and surface acting, respectively. In antecedent-focussed emotional regulation, people modify their perceptions of a situation through cognitive reappraisal or by drawing on emotional memories before the emotion is fully developed (Gross, 1998b), which mirrors Hochschild’s (1983) strategy of deep acting. In response-focussed emotional regulation, people change their depiction of a given emotion after experiencing that emotion rather than adjust their perception of the situation (Gross, 1998; Totterdell and Holman, 2003), which is similar to surface acting (Grandey, 2000). The emotional regulation model also posits that emotional labor will have various antecedents and consequences and that this process will be affected by a number of individual and organizational factors (Totterdell and Holman, 2003). With regard to the antecedents of emotional labor, there are two main situational antecedents in the model: the expectations that organizations have of their employees’ interactions with customers and events at work that provoke an emotional response. In this research, events at work are examined, as they vary over time. More specifically, Grandey (2000) proposed that affective events from customers would have a greater impact on emotional regulation than those from coworkers because display rules are more explicit for customer interactions. Grandey et al. (2002) found that customers are the most frequent source of angering events for a group of part-time employees and that faking emotions occurred more often in response to customers than coworkers. Thus, customer-related factors and their emotional effects are investigated in the present study. Model and hypotheses Customer participation and emotional labor Customer participation is defined as “the extent to which customers provide resources in the form of time and/or effort, information, and co-production for product and service


consumption” (Hsieh et al., 2004. p. 190). The subject of customer participation in service production and delivery has received significant attention over the past 20 years. While the wealth of research into this topic has favored the development of numerous analytical perspectives, it has also brought to light the active role of customers, who are no longer simply present but rather participate in service co-production. The argument suggested by Vargo and Lusch (2004) that the “customer is always a co-creator,” serves as one of the foundational premises for the emerging service-dominant logic of marketing (p. 3). Thus, customers are no longer a “passive audience,” but “active co-producers.” They are actively co-creating value with service providers, through which their personal needs are better served and satisfaction enhanced (Dong et al., 2008; Marinkovic and Obradovic, 2015). In relation to effects of social supports on emotional labor, Grandey (2000) argued that greater social support from supervisors or coworkers may affect the level and type of emotional labor in which employees engage. Others suggest that social support should help to create a positive working environment, which by extension should minimize the need to engage in emotional labor when display rules are positive (Schneider and Bowen, 1985). Considering the boundary-spanning role of service employees, customers are important interaction sources for frontline employees and may certainly aid or hinder job performance. As explained previously, customer participation is a voluntary, valuable behavior, and it can be an indicator of customer involvement. For example, when customers provide participatory behavior, they emulate the behavior of employees by contributing effort, time, or other resources to meet employees’ expectations (Kelley et al., 1990). Thus, from the employee’s perspective, customer participation can be a signal of the customer’s support. As a result, perceived customer participation would be a unique type of social support and, thus, can be one of the major influential resources for determining a service employee’s emotional labor. Bailey et al. (2001) also suggested that the customer has a specific role in the formation and evolution of the emotional aspects of the service encounter. In customer-service settings, where positive expressions are expected, feeling positive about the social environment due to the social support from customers may mean that less emotional labor is necessary. One may genuinely feel that the emotions that are expected in a service environment if interpersonal relationships are positive and supportive. Indirectly, support may help employees cope with the stress of service jobs. Thus, social support from customers may reduce emotional labor by creating a positive work environment in which it is easier for employees to feel and express the positive emotions that are expected by their organization: H1. Perceived customer participation is negatively related to surface acting. H2. Perceived customer participation is positively related to deep acting. Emotional labor and work engagement With regards to the consequences of emotional labor, there is evidence that, although emotional regulation enables people to behave flexibly, it requires significant effort and can have physiological and cognitive costs (e.g. Muraven and Baumeister, 2000; Richards and Gross, 2000). Previous work in the area of emotional labor consistently supports the notion that emotional labor does and can have both functional and

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dysfunctional consequences for the individual and the organization. Research conducted at the individual level has typically demonstrated that emotional labor can affect workers’ well-being ( Johnson and Spector, 2007). Generally, the influence of emotional labor on employees’ outcomes, such as health, psychological well-being and work attitude, has generally been found to be less favorable. As a matter of fact, in the majority of past research assessing the relationship between emotional labor and employees, outcomes demonstrates that deep acting leads to more favorable outcomes than surface acting does (Kim, 2008). The most often studied negative and positive sides of employees’ well-being are burnout and work engagement, respectively. Burnout is usually defined as a syndrome of exhaustion, cynicism, and lack of professional efficacy (Maslach et al., 2001). Work engagement is defined as a positive work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption (Bakker and Schaufeli, 2008). Burnout and work engagement are distinct, yet negatively correlated concepts (Maslach et al., 2001). When an employee exhibits surface acting, he or she experiences emotional dissonance owing to the discrepancy between expressions and inner feelings. Due to the emotional dissonance, employees are less engaged in their work. Previous research has demonstrated that emotional labor is likely to lead to increased emotional exhaustion, particularly when an employee’s feelings do not match display roles and the employee has to engage in surface acting to display the expected emotions (Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002; Johnson and Spector, 2007). Studies also have found that emotional dissonance is associated with emotional exhaustion (Karatepe and Tekinkus, 2006; Karatepe and Aga, 2013). Thus, engaging in surface acting results in emotional dissonance, which may lead to lower levels of work engagement. However, since deep acting by definition minimizes emotional dissonance by bringing feelings in line with expressions, deep acting may have fewer cognitive costs than surface acting (Richards and Gross, 2000). According to Côté (2005), the more authentic a positive display appears (deep acting), the more friendly customers perceive the service provider to be and the more satisfied they are with the encounter (Grandey et al., 2005), which may translate into fewer stress-inducing exchanges and more energetic effects via connection with work activities: H3. Surface acting is negatively related to work engagement. H4. Deep acting is positively related to work engagement. Moderating role of CO According to Grandey (2000), many individual differences are related to emotional labor, including personality. Grandey (2000) insisted that emotional labor researchers need to integrate personality variables into the emotional labor framework in order to understand the concept of emotional labor more clearly. The primary focus of marketing and sales efforts in the current business environment is to accurately determine and satisfy customer needs in order to create value in long-term relationships, and this is the essence of CO. Research on CO has shown the importance of differentiating between individual-level and firm-level variables (Brown et al., 2002; Donavan et al., 2004). Brown et al. (2002) found that CO was influenced by deeper personality traits and, in turn, influenced worker performance. More recently, researchers (Donavan et al., 2004) have demonstrated that CO, conceptualized as a state-like psychological variable, is


related to a number of important individual-level outcomes, including the performance of customer-orientated behaviors (Stock and Hoyer, 2005), service worker overall performance (Brown et al., 2002), and service worker job attitudes such as commitment and satisfaction (Donavan et al., 2004). As a personality trait, CO can be defined as an employee’s tendency or predisposition to meet customer needs in the job context (Brown et al., 2002). Since a frontline employee with high CO can read the needs of customers and enjoy solving their problems, a customer-oriented employee has fewer difficulties with understanding customers’ needs, more positive evaluations in customer participation, and fewer instances of exhibiting feigned behavior toward customers. In other words, the reducing effect of customer participation in relation to surface acting will be enhanced when a service employee has high CO compared to low CO. As explained previously, given the greater mental effort involved in deep acting, it appears that this form of emotional labor is more consistent with a strong concern for one’s customers (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993). Customer-oriented employees evaluate customer participation as a more valuable and cooperative effort, regards this as social support from customer and exhibit a sincerely positive customer-oriented attitude, which is called deep acting. Thus, frontline employees with high CO appraise perceived customer participation as more friendly than those with lower CO due to their natural disposition to view the work environment and people around them with a customer-service focus: H5. CO moderates the relationship between perceived customer participation and surface acting. H6. CO moderates the relationship between perceived customer participation and deep acting. Moderating role of perceived fit with customer As suggested by Ashforth and Humphrey (1993) and Morris and Feldman (1996), and further supported by literature on emotional regulation, the environment is an important factor in understanding emotional management. It is very possible for the situation in which employees work to affect the level and type of emotional labor in which they engage (Grandey, 2000). According to Bailey et al. (2001), a service employee’s attitude toward customers or the company will combine with situational factors to affect emotional balance in a service encounter. There is a long history in psychology of trying to explain behavior in terms of interaction between person and environment. Many of these interactional models view person and environment as independent entities but characterize them along commensurate dimensions so that the degree of fit, or congruence, between person and environment can be assessed. Although many researchers in marketing investigate the relationship between customers and frontline employees, research has primarily focussed on the employees’ perceived fit with the organization and members of the organization and has overlooked the importance of PCF. Service employees serve a critical boundary-spanning role (Dubinsky et al., 1986), and customers are important sources of interaction for frontline employees. Thus, frontline employees’ environmental factors are different from those of other “internal” employees. PCF would be a unique concept from frontline employee-environment fit and, thus, can be one of the major influential factors for determining a salesperson’s attitudes, behaviors, and performance outcomes.


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The concept of PCF can be defined as the interpersonal congruence between employees and customers and focusses on the interpersonal compatibility between individuals and their customers during the interactions between them. The notion that PCF leads to more favorable work attitudes and behaviors toward customers is straightforward. Perceived fit with customer should be a result of positive work environment, which is based on the employee’s congruence with customers. If service employees perceive more fit with customers, they may evaluate customer participation as a more meaningful and therefore experience less emotional dissonance. Then, service employees who experience less emotional dissonance in the expression of positive emotions will reduce their level of emotional labor, resulting in more deep acting and less surface acting. Thus employees’ perceived fit with customers will enhance the positive relationship between customer participation and deep acting and reduce the negative effect of customer participation on surface acting: H7. Perceived fit with customer moderates the relationship between perceived customer participation and surface acting. H8. Perceived fit with customer moderates the relationship between perceived customer participation and deep acting. Method and analyses Measures To measure perceived customer participation, Yoon et al.’s (2004) six-item measure was used. Customer participation was operationalized in terms of how the service customer, as a partial employee, behaves to the employee during service provision, reflecting the attentive communication and interpersonal factors such as attentiveness, courtesy, respect, and friendliness. To assess emotional labor, two three-item measures from Groth et al. (2009) were used. The scale was originally developed by Brotheridge and Lee (2003). Generally, perceived fit involves asking people directly whether or not they believe they are a good fit with an organization and its members (Cable and DeRue, 2002; Lauver and Kristof-Brown, 2001). Edwards et al. (2006) refer to this approach as a molar approach to assessing perceived fit, which focusses on perceptions of the match or the similarity, as opposed to focussing on perceptions of the discrepancy or on perceptions of the environment and person separately. Recent meta-analytic investigations have referred to this conceptualization of fit as subjective fit (Hoffman and Woehr, 2006) or perceived fit (Kristof-Brown et al., 2005). Thus, to measure PCF, I revised and adapted Cable and DeRue’s (2002) subjective-fit (perceived-fit) scale to measure employees’ perceived congruency with their customers. CO was measured with a six-item scale adapted from Stock and Hoyer (2005). This measure reflects the affinity for being in contact with customers and the understanding of the importance of CO for both the individual and the company’s performance. For this study, work engagement was measured by the Utrecht Engagement Scale with nine items (UWES-9; Schaufeli et al., 2006). The scale has three dimensions, comprising vigor (three items), dedication (three items), and absorption (three items). All measures were adapted from prior research. All items were evaluated on seven-point scales ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”


Sampling Data for the study were collected from a cross-sectional sample of retail bank and insurance companies in South Korea. The sample contained responses from frontline employees. Participation was solicited from various large banks and insurance companies across the country. All of the organizations involved in the data collection offer and sell financial-service products to customers directly. An interviewer scheduled appointments with branch managers, who then introduced the interviewer to the other employees in their branches. The interviewer presented the respondents with the survey questionnaires and collected the questionnaires upon completion. Questionnaires were distributed to 750 frontline employees across several banks and insurance companies. Of these, 543 usable questionnaires were returned, a response rate of 72.4 percent. In total, 25 questionnaires were deleted because six were internal employees with no customer contact, and 19 respondents did not fill out the questionnaires completely (adjusted response rate ¼ 69.07 percent). The employee sample was 67.2 percent female, with an average age of 35 years and less than eight years of tenure in their current position, and 48.5 percent of the sample had a university degree.


Measurement model analysis and CFA results The measurement model in this study consisted of 32 reflective indicators and six correlated latent factors corresponding to the six constructs of the study depicted in Figure 1. To do this, a six-construct confirmatory factor analysis was estimated using the covariance matrix as an input. After poorly loading items were deleted, the finalized confirmatory factor model fit the data well. χ2 (df) was 569.44 (237), goodness of fit index was 0.91, comparative fit index (CFI) was 0.99, and root mean squared error approximation was 0.055. In addition, the hypothesized factor loadings were all statistically significant at the 0.01 level, and the completely standardized factor loadings were all well above the recommended level of 0.50 (Table I). Table I reports the number of items, factor loading, Cronbach’s α, composite reliability, and average shared variance estimates. Structural model analysis I tested the hypotheses proposed herein using structural equation modeling with LISREL 8.5 ( Jöreskog and Sorbom, 1996). The overall fit of this model was good. The χ2 (df) was 961.16 (245), CFI was 0.97, RFI was 0.0.96, and NFI was 0.96. The structural estimates of this model are shown in Table II. As shown, the analyses provide support for most hypothesized relationships.

Construct Customer participation Surface acting Deep acting Customer orientation Person-customer fit Work engagement

Path loading

CR

Cronbach α

AVE

0.57 0.82 0.74 0.93 0.83 0.94 0.69 0.85 0.81 0.89 0.77 0.87

0.852 0.892 0.922 0.894 0.877 0.922

0.760 0.891 0.911 0.913 0.848 0.941

0.597 0.736 0.800 0.630 0.704 0.665

Table I. Measurement items and CFA results

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H1 and H2 pertained to customer participation and its influence on emotional labor (surface acting and deep acting). The results indicate that perceived customer participation exhibits the predicted negative influence on surface acting (standardized coefficient value of −0.34, p o 0.01) as well as a positive effect on deep acting (standardized coefficient value of 0.88, p o 0.01). Therefore, H1 and H2 are supported. In addition, the influence of service employee emotional labor on work engagement was tested. The results show that surface acting has a negative influence on a frontline employee’s work engagement (H3: standardized coefficient value of −0.09, po0.05). The effect of service employees’ deep acting on work engagement was positive and significant (standardized coefficient value of 0.67, po0.01). Thus, H3 and H4 are supported. Moderating effects of competitive intensity Moderated regressions were employed to assess the moderating effect of CO and PCF in the hypothesized relationships between customer participation and emotional labor. Table III presents coefficient values and corresponding t-values for the hypotheses. First, the moderating effects of CO were assessed by forming an interaction term by multiplying the corresponding latent variables, customer participation, and CO. To reduce multicollinearity, main-effect variables were mean-centered before Hypothesis

Table II. Results of hypotheses

Relationship

Estimates

t-value

Result

H1 Customer participation→surface acting −0.34 H2 0.88 Customer participation→deep acting H3 −0.09 Surface acting→work engagement H4 0.67 Deep acting→work engagement Notes: Estimates are completely standardized. *p o0.05; **p o0.01

−6.44** 19.81** −2.02* 13.38**

H1 H2 H3 H4

Dependent variable Predictor

Table III. Moderating regression results

Step 1

Surface acting Step 2 Step 3

CP −0.211** −0.147* CO −0.149* CP × CO (H5) df 1 2 R2 0.045 0.063 ΔR2 0.045 0.018 Adjusted R2 0.042 0.058 F 20.207 14.410 CP −0.213** −0.140** PCF −0.160** CP × PCF (H7) df 1 2 R2 0.045 0.066 2 ΔR 0.045 0.020 Adjusted R2 0.043 0.062 F 20.863 15.389 Notes: CP, customer participation; CO, *p o0.05; **p o 0.01

0.138** 0.174** −0.110* 3 0.074 0.012 0.068 11.516 −0.134* −0.173** −0.075 3 0.071 0.006 0.065 11.162 customer

Predictor

Step 1

Supported Supported Supported Supported

Deep acting Step 2 Step 3

CP 0.406** 0.134** CO 0.635** CP × CO (H6) df 1 2 R2 0.165 0.494 ΔR2 0.165 0.329 Adjusted R2 0.163 0.491 F 86.322 212.519 CP 0.409** 0.092* PCF 0.693** CP × PCF (H8) df 1 2 R2 0.167 0.547 2 ΔR 0.167 0.380 Adjusted R2 0.165 0.545 F 88.346 265.956 orientation; PCF, perceived fit with

0.138** 0.625** −0.047 3 0.496 0.002 0.492 142.548 0.098** 0.682** 0.068* 3 0.552 0.005 0.549 180.203 customer.


constructing the interactions. Second, the same procedures were conducted to examine the moderating effect of perceived fit with customer in the links between customer participation and emotional labor (SA and DA). The interaction term was made by multiplying the customer participation and PCF. Moderated regression analyses results are shown in Table III. Table III examines the interaction effects of customer participation and CO on the service employees’ surface acting and deep acting. Results showed that the effect of customer participation on surface acting was negative and significantly affected by CO ( β ¼ −0.110, t ¼ −2.330). Therefore, H5 is supported. However, the moderating effect of CO in the link between customer participation and deep acting (H6: β ¼ −0.047, t ¼ −1.347) is not significant. Next, H7 posits that customer participation would be less negatively related to service employees’ surface acting when they perceive more fit with the customer. The results of the hierarchical moderated regression demonstrate an insignificant interaction effect of customer participation and perceived fit with customer on employees’ surface acting ( β ¼ −0.075, p W 0.01). Thus, H7 is not supported. Finally, the positive moderating effect of the employees’ perceived fit with customers in the relationship between perceived customer participation and employees’ deep acting was also examined. The result indicates that the interaction between customer participation and perceived fit with customer has significant and positive effect ( β ¼ 0.068, p o 0.05) on employees’ deep acting. Thus, H8 is supported. Discussion General results discussion The present study represents the first step toward integrating the literature on customer participation and emotional labor. In an extension of past research documenting the robust effect of social support from supervisors or coworkers on emotional labor (see Totterdell and Holman, 2003), this study found that service employees who had been exposed to customers’ participatory behavior experienced higher levels of support from customers, which led them to perceive less emotional dissonance and exert a lower level of emotional labor than employees who were exposed to unsupportive customers. This suggests that perceived customer participation predicts another important workrelated outcome – namely, emotional labor. This relationship implies that customer participation is a specific type of social support, and customers should be considered an important source of social support for service employees. Second, the current study indicates that CO and perceived fit with customer play significant moderating roles in the relationship between customer participation and emotional labor. The findings advance our understanding that CO enhances the reducing effect of customer participation on surface acting. Indeed, customer-oriented employees may find the work environment to be less stressful and be less inclined to exhibit feigned behaviors toward customers. On the other hand, perceived fit with the customer enhances the positive effect of customer participation on employees’ deep acting. If service employees perceive more fit with customers, then they may experience less stressful emotional customer interactions and exhibit more authentic behaviors toward customers. Consistent with H3 and H4, the results also show that service employees who exhibited a higher level of emotional labor (surface acting) found it more difficult to engage in their work and to provide more deep acting. To clarify, surface acting is negatively linked to work engagement, whereas deep acting is positively related to


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work engagement, suggesting that the performance of surface acting is detrimental to employee well-being. Conversely, performing deep acting can help enhance work engagement. It can thus be surmised that service employees are better off actually feeling the organizationally mandated emotion than “faking it,” as more work engagement is likely with deep acting method. In this study, H6, which contends that customer participation will be more positively related to employees’ deep acting when they have a higher level of CO, is not supported. One of the possible reasons for this is that CO can be the consequence of customer participation and has a role as a mediator in the chain of customer participation and employee deep acting. If employees are exposed to supportive customers, then they may develop a more positive attitude toward customers, which leads to exhibition of more authentic behavior. The results also showed that the interaction effect of service employees’ perceived fit with customers and customer participation on service employees’ surface acting is not significant. As shown in Table III, PCF has a direct and negative effect on surface acting but has no interaction effect with customer participation on surface acting. In future research, relationships among customer participation, CO, and PCF should be investigated to increase our understanding of the ideas and issues. Managerial implications Beyond the theoretical implications of the results discussed earlier, this study also has several important practical implications for service employees and firms. First, an important practical implication for managers is the need 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. This study suggests that service employees’ perceived customer participation necessarily enhances the economic benefits of productivity gains by using customers as substitutes for parts of the employees’ labor. Thus, managers should magnify the positive effect of perceived customer participation on emotional labor by increasing frontline employees’ understanding of customer participation. As explained previously, customer participation is a voluntary, valuable behavior, and it can be a signal of customer involvement. Thus, if managers can improve their employees’ attitudes regarding customer involvement, this may expand the positive effect of employees’ perceived customer participation as a social support, thereby decreasing service employees’ positive emotional customer interactions. 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. More customer-oriented employees are expected to follow display rules with relative ease and authenticity. They are resistant to surface acting and exhibit fewer feigned behaviors, which can deteriorate customers’ evaluations of service. For this reason, managers should consider screening customer-oriented behaviors when hiring new employees. Those who have more positive attitudes would obviously be more attractive as employees, and these attitudes could be reinforced during training and through motivational incentives.


Third, results indicate that frontline employees who worked with more suitable customers provide more reliable and genuine behaviors toward customers. Such authentic displays are consistent with organizational as well as customer expectations and ultimately result in customer satisfaction and improved organizational outcomes (Marinkovic and Obradovic, 2015). Hence, it may be wise to invest in the recruitment and selection of frontline employees. From a manager’s perspective, however, employees’ perceived fit with customers is not easy to manage because they are not able to influence the perceptions of employees and customers simultaneously. However, if managers have general information about the customers that they target, they can recruit and place employees who fit better with their customers based on their demographical and psychological characteristics. This will increase the positive effects of PCF in employees’ emotionally stressful environments. Limitations and future research Although this study expands our knowledge of frontline employees’ emotional labor, it has several limitations, and viable prospects for further research remain. 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. Although Chan et al. (2010) suggests that professional financial services (e.g. financial institutions) are appropriate contexts to assess the desirability of customer participation, these may delimit generalizations. To broaden the database for further generalizations, testing the viability of this research model in other service sectors would be fruitful. Further extensions into other sectors that differ in type of customer contact, level of customer participation, and transaction type, could lead to a contingency framework and show if and how the hypothesized linkages change according to service characteristics. 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 our 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. Customer participation, for instance, can be measured on the basis of customers’ assessments of their own participatory behavior, and CO and PCF can be measured from manager or coworker perspectives. Third, this study is limited by its cross-sectional approach. The cross-sectional nature of the present study does not allow causal inferences. The measuring method of the survey was based on the participants’ experiences. Although this methodology is well established, participants answering the questions based their responses on respective memories, which may produce biased results. Future research should attempt to conduct a longitudinal study where the differences in the relationships can be studied at various points in time, providing greater support for causality. This is particularly important in the investigation of the roles of CO and perceived fit with customers as moderators of the effects of customer participation on employees’ emotional labor.

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Corresponding author Jaewon Yoo can be contacted at: [email protected]

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