Customer participation and citizenship behavioral influences on employee performance, satisfaction, commitment, and turnover intention

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Abstract

Despite increasing awareness of the importance of customer behaviors in service delivery, understanding consequences relating to employees receives little attention. Therefore, using data from a large electronic firm relating to customers, employees, and managers, this study examines the effects of customer participation and citizenship behavior on employee performance, satisfaction and commitment, as well as indirect effects on turnover intention. Furthermore, the study examines how similarity and likeability moderate the effects of customer participation and citizenship behavior on employee satisfaction. The study also includes a laboratory experiment and provides further support for causal direction. The article discusses marketing implications of the results.

Section snippets

Customers as human resources

The service marketing literature recognizes the importance of customers as human resources. This study integrates different facets of several streams of research regarding customers as human resources and describes how each of these theoretical perspectives justifies the influence of customer behavior on employee attitude and behavior. The first contains studies on how customers can enhance firm productivity. Lovelock and Young (1979) are the first to highlight the issue of customers as human

Conceptual model and hypotheses

Fig. 1A depicts the main effects model. Social cognitive theory suggests that observing someone else performing a behavior increases individuals' perceived confidence in their ability to perform it successfully by learning appropriate and effective strategies for coping with challenging situations and by acquiring new skills (Compeau and Higgins, 1995). In turn, this outcome expectation increases individuals' actual performance, because beliefs in abilities generally intensify people's efforts

Sample and data collection

A large household electronic firm with several major branches was contacted in order to obtain a sample. The firm employs frontline service employees (FSEs), each of whom manages a portfolio of customers. FSEs visit customers regularly and make sure that products are in the optimal condition. In addition to the initial service interaction, FSEs are responsible for ongoing customer contacts.

To reduce the possibility of common method bias, data were collected from three separate sources;

Study 2: experiment

Establishing the causal nature of the relationship between customer behaviors and employee outcomes in a cross-sectional survey like Study 1 is difficult. Thus, this study is a laboratory experiment. If the manipulation of customer behaviors directly influences employee behaviors, then H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 receive further support for causal direction.

Discussion

This study develops and tests a conceptual model of how customer behaviors influence frontline service employees. This study applies a PLS structural equation modeling to the field data consisting of 332 customers, 142 FSEs, and 31 managers. Consistent with the social cognitive theory, results of this investigation suggest that customer participation behavior has direct, positive effects on employee performance, satisfaction and commitment. The results also indicate that customer citizenship

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Hoseong Jeon and Daniel Sersland for constructive comments on the earlier version of this manuscript.

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