Impact of Employee Gender and Job Congruency on Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

Selecting the best employees for customer contact jobs is critically important for customer satisfaction and, ultimately, an organization's success. One potential influence on satisfaction is the congruency between the characteristics of the employee and customer expectations. This research examines how customers respond to employees who are not of the typical, or expected, gender in gender‐typed jobs. Two experiments were conducted that used scenarios of service encounters to manipulate employee gender and gender dominance of the occupation in between‐subjects designs. The dependent variables were level of satisfaction with the service encounter (Experiment 1) and employee evaluation (Experiment 2). The results generally showed that respondents evaluated employees more positively when they performed congruent rather than incongruent jobs. In addition, gender and trait characteristics of the respondents influenced the way employee gender affected evaluations. The preference for congruent employees was strongest among male respondents and cross‐sex‐typed respondents. A different type of congruency was also found. That is, some respondents evaluated employees more positively if they were the same rather than the opposite gender as themselves. This effect was strongest for female and for gender‐aschematic respondents.

Customers’ perceptions of service quality: Do servers’ age stereotypes matter?

“…Scenarios were designed by two marketing researchers, two servers, and one customer. Written scenarios describing service encounters were based on the SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al, 1985(Parasuraman et al, , 1988 and DINESERV (Stevens et al, 1995) dimensions, with each dimension including one favorable and one unfavorable scenario as a manipulation control (Mohr and Henson, 1996). Furthermore, fine dining restaurant in this study was defined as a full-service restaurant that offers high quality food and services, and that the average bill perperson was more than U.S. $20 (Oubre and Brown, 2009;Ryu and Jang, 2007).…”

“…Based on the aims of this research compared to previous studies (Chadee and Mattsson, 1996;Iacobucci and Ostrom, 1993;Tsaur, 2007, 2009;Mohr and Henson, 1996), two statements were designed for the evaluations of the five dimensions of the perceived service quality: "You feel that the way this waiter serves you is" and "You feel that the overall quality of service in this restaurant is." The survey uses a seven-point rating scale ranging from "very poor" to "very good" to measure five dimensions of the participants' perceptions.…”

Occupational and Industry Sex Segregation and the Work–Family Interface

“…Customers have also been shown to have negative reactions to employees in sex-atypical jobs. For example, research has demonstrated that customers were uncomfortable with and had decreased satisfaction when dealing with employees that did not match the gender-type of the job (Mohr and Henson 1996;Williams 1989).…”

Gender Differences in Perceptions of Work Experiences and Service Quality Provided By Front-Line Service Workers in Four- And Five- Star Hotels in Turkey: A Research Note

“…Women customers place more value than men on the relationship with service providers (Iacobucci & Ostrom, 1993), with men rating service quality higher than women (Charalambos, Eugenia & Niki, 2004). The gender of the server influences customer satisfaction ratings when it confirms a gender stereotype (Mohr & Henson, 1996) Finally, customer satisfaction with service failures has also been found to be influenced by the gender of the service provider ((McColl-Kennedy, Daus & Sparks, 2003).…”