Assessing the employee EL and customer perception link
A cardinal empirical study by Groth, Hennig-Thurau and Walsh (2009) examines the link between employees’ emotional labour and customers’ perceptions of the service experience. Work by Groth et al. (2009) has been most inspirational for this thesis. This is one of the few
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studies to extend the concept of EL to dyadic simultaneous analysis of responses from customers and employees. Groth et al. (2009) examined the impact of employee EL on customers’ perceived service quality. Groth et al. (2009) have also covered questions pertaining to customers’ ability to identify between fake and genuine emotions of service providers, and also the impact of their assessments on the service experience. The study recorded how the customers’ detection of authenticity of employee EL (whether SA or DA) impacted their perception of the service quality. Findings were summarized as- deep acting exerts a positive effect on perceived customer orientation and service quality; surface acting does not have a negative effect on the customers as long as customers do not recognize it. The strategic implications of the research lie in the manner of collection of data, from dyads of employees and customer reactions, thus recording data immediately after the service encounter. Theoretical model was tested using structural equation modelling. The study has a direct connect to this thesis. The DA was postulated to affect service quality positively and SA was postulated to impact service quality negatively, however Groth et al. (2009) found support only for DA, but not for SA. This thesis also sets out to postulate that employee DA would impact customer interaction quality positively and employee SA would impact customer interaction quality negatively. Service quality construct in Groth et al. (2009) is replaced with interaction quality (Brady & Cronin, 2001) in this thesis. These relay the connected hypotheses to the first question. It would be interesting to test whether the findings by Groth et al. (2009) would be emulated in this thesis. The customer detection of EL is replaced by customer expectations of EL in this thesis given that the context is that of service relationships and familiarity of the relationships may cause the expectations of the customers to vary. Groth et al. (2009) highlight two key areas of this thesis- impact of employee EL on customer perceived interaction quality and mediation of customer expectation of EL on the direct relationship between employee EL and customer perceived interaction quality.
While Groth et al. (2009) studied the detection of deep acting and surface acting in the context of service encounters (Price et al., 1995; Wang et al., 2012; Wharton & Erickson, 1993) this thesis considers customers’ expectations of EL from employees when engaged with the employees in a ‘service relationship’. None of the previous studies have engaged in understanding EL in a service relationship. Despite the high intensity of interactions in service relationships and relevance of EL in high-intensity interactions, EL has not been tested in such a context. There are “pseudo-relationships” (Gutek et al., 1999, p.219) that exist between a
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customer and an organization, where due to the uniformity of service across all service providers (for an organization), the customer finds it appropriate to indulge in an encounter. For example, visiting Burger King for a quick bite is a pseudo-relationship (Gutek et al., 1999, p.219). However, this thesis delves in employee-customer relationships in a person-to-person context, especially because customers exert a higher power and influence over employees for engaging in EL than other entities such as the co-workers or supervisors (Wharton & Erickson, 1993; Totterdell & Holman, 2003). The EL expectations of a Burger King associate and his/her financial adviser at a bank could be completely different. He/she probably knows the financial adviser over a long period of time, interacts on a regular basis, has befriended him/her to a large extent and trusts his/her investments with the employee. Such a service relationship might continue between these two entities even if the financial adviser changed his/her firm(s) (Gutek et al., 1999). The relationship between a customer and his/her relationship manager could be strong enough to continue even if the employee switched work association to another bank (Parkington & Schneider, 1979). EL has not been explored in an intense interaction context such as private/customized banking before and the dearth of literature offers a window of opportunity to explore EL in the service relationships.
Establishing the service relationship context
Customers are less affected by service employees’ emotional labour or the lack of it when the service encounters are low-affect, low intimacy types like a convenience store (Price et al., 1995; Grandey, 2000). This is probably because the customers also realize that service providers do not always express real emotions, and the customers also do not expect or care when they perceive that such an effort is being made. In an extended service relationship context, the employee EL is valued more since it is a way of communicating trustworthiness (Grayson, 1998). This is extremely relevant for this study since a similar effect may be observed in service relationships amongst private banking professionals and customers (Kiely, 2005).
Verbal abuse from the customers is found to be more frequent in the EL oriented jobs, because the anonymity of the customer is intact in the service encounters, and avoidance of another contact with the same service employee is possible. However, this could drastically contrast in service relationships, where the tendency for multiple contacts and the longevity of the relationship exists over time (Grandey, Kern & Frone, 2007).
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Lin and Lin (2011) conducted a study across several service encounters, and different types of service contexts. Independent observers marked their observations on the encounters and also took feedback from the customers to find that the service environment, the group mood amongst peers and self-emotion affected the employee affective delivery which in turn had a positive effect on the customers’ service encounter satisfaction and loyalty intention.
A strong association and difference exists in the demands of EL owing to the interactional demands of services. A longer duration could demand heavier emotion regulation, than a shorter one, as postulated by Grandey (2000). Greater familiarity between a relationship manager and his/her customer could actually enable them to map each other’s emotions far better since they meet over several encounters and probably even generate a rapport or friendship over time. The employee EL and customers’ perception could also be much more pronounced and a certain expectation could also be set by the customer in such a context. Employee EL could be smooth or difficult depending on the kind of service relationship that he/she share with the customer. The customers’ detection and their perception could vary from being extremely demanding to predominantly lenient on the extant of EL adopted by the employees. This thesis is the first to study EL in a service relationship context while previous EL researches have mainly been done in the context of emotional encounters. Differences may also exist due to the different types of services (Silvestro, Fitzgerald, Johnson & Voss, 1992). This thesis study is the first of its kind to study it in a professional services category like private banking, where long-term relationships exist with an emphasis on interactions being high (Horn & Rudolph, 2011). The stakes of these interactions are also high with many financial decisions being taken by the customer over these interactions. The intensity of the interactions is much more pronounced, and thus the intensity of EL (Grandey, 2000) elapsed in these interactions would provide interesting insights to the study of EL from the employee and the customer perspectives in a service relationship context.
Kiely (2005) studied emotions in the context of business-to-business service relationships in the shipping industry. Adopting an interpretive style, it is one of the first steps towards understanding emotional labour in complex service relationships. Kiely’s (2005) findings depicted that most employees engaged in DA, although there were occasions where they feigned their real emotions to emote otherwise. The interesting aspect was that most of the employees felt an anguish at not being able to deliver as per the customer expectations, and this was an innate feeling rather than a monitored, a centralized or a trained emotion (Kiely,
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2005). The customers also felt strained from expressing dissatisfaction or when they were required to send a negative response because of the long years of relationship. Many of the customers had a friendship and strong linkages interred with the professional service (Gutek et al., 1999, Kiely, 2005; Parkington & Shneider, 1979). This study links to the mediation of the employee EL and the customer perceived interaction quality relationship by the customer expectations of EL. It is one of the first studies to consider a service relationship context although in the business-to-business context where both the employees and customers were associated with firms involved in business transactions with each other. The context of this thesis is however person-to-person service relationships where the customer is an independent and an individual entity, while the employee may be associated to a bank/financial institution. This chapter considered the evolution of EL literature from organization, employee and customer perspectives. It also sought to capture the essence of interaction quality and its relevance in service relationships and in the banking context. Chapter 3: Hypotheses Formulation helps connect the various literatures discussed thus far and presents the development of the underlying hypotheses for this thesis.
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