Customer perceptions of frontline employees’ extra-role helping behaviors

Abstract

<jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title> <jats:p>Frontline employees (FLEs) play a pivotal role in service delivery. Beyond their expected in-role behaviors, FLEs often have to perform extra-role behaviors such as providing additional help to customers. The purpose of this study is to investigate how customers’ power distance belief (PDB) influences their perceptions of FLEs’ warmth and competence when FLEs perform extra-role helping behaviors.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title> <jats:p>Four experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses. The first three experiments used a one factor two-level (PDB: low vs high) between-participants design. The fourth one used a 2 (PDB: low vs high) × 2 (firm reputation: low vs high) between-participants design.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title> <jats:p>The results indicate that, compared to high-PDB customers, low-PDB customers perceive greater warmth in FLEs’ extra-role helping behaviors but no significant difference in FLEs’ perceived competence. Importantly, these effects are mediated by customer gratitude. Moreover, these effects are moderated by firm reputation such that customers’ perceptions of FLEs’ warmth and competence are both enhanced when the firm has a favorable reputation.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title> <jats:p>To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first to identify the differential effects of PDB on customer perceptions of FLEs’ warmth and competence in the context of FLEs’ extra-role helping behaviors and to reveal the mediating role of gratitude. These findings contribute to the literatures on FLEs’ extra-role behaviors and social perceptions of both warmth and competence.</jats:p> </jats:sec>

Resource integration and dynamic capability of frontline employee during COVID-19 pandemic: From value creation and engineering management perspectives

“…FLE adaptability encompasses various new dimensions which include interpersonal service offerings, job satisfaction, FLE performance, and so on ( Sony & Nandakumar, 2014 ). FLEs are found to function in various ways and are often found to require stepping outside of their typical roles to help the potential customers ( Wang et al, 2020 ), differentiate brand ( Sirianni et al, 2013 ), and improve recovery service ( van der Heijden et al, 2013 ). Organizations are reported to have spent millions of dollars to properly train and develop the capability of FLEs, but still there remains variation in their performance level ( Statistica, 2020 ).…”

Role of Trust in Influencing Service Recommendation from Customers for Beauty Service Industry

“…(8) Service employees often play a role beyond their expected in-role behaviour to providing additional help to customers such as re-educating customers and often guiding them in the co-delivery process. (51) Service employees are thus judged based on their attitude, (26) competence, (29) and expertise. (52) It is thus understood that customers trust beauty service setups where the service employee details out the procedure as well as the products used during the service job.…”

Exploring the Nexus Between Internal Branding and Front-line Employees Performance in Indian Public Sector Banks: Serial Mediation Approach

“…More specifically, their performance conveys service brand. In doing so, organizations encourage their FLEs to go beyond extra mile to impress the customers in the pursuit of service excellence (Cheng & Chen, 2017;Wang et al, 2020). In-role and extra-role performance are the various aspects of the performance.…”

“…Whereas extra-role behaviours are delineated as OCB (Podsakoff et al, 2009)-generally called as discretionary behaviours beyond job descriptions, and rewards are not entitled to these behaviours and further augments the effectiveness of the organization (Organ et al, 2006;Podsakoff et al, 2009). Furthermore, organizations expect their FLEs to exhibit OCB due to fierce competition and differentiation in the pursuit of service excellence by the service organizations, whereby organizations are unable to design FLEs roles in advance ( Van Dyne & LePine, 1998;Wang et al, 2020).…”

“…Even though literature highlighted the impact of employees' OCB towards organization and their co-workers (Podsakoff et al, 2009;Van Dyne & LePine, 1998); and towards customers (Bettencourt & Brown, 1997). Specifically, OCB towards customers plays an indispensable role owing to delivering high-quality services by doing little extra and continuous shift in customer demands during service encounter (Bettencourt et al, 2001;Wang et al, 2020).…”