서비스 종업원의 감정표현과 진정성이 관계품질에 미치는 영향 - 레포의 매개적 역할 -

Service is delivered to customers through interactions between service employees and customers that will influence encounter outcomes. During service delivery, physical, psychological,emotional elements will be put into the service encounter. As the influence of emotional factors has been recently highlighted, service managers show unprecedentedly high level of interest in contact employees’ emotional display to their customers. Because of this, the service employees are being much more demanded to express positive feelings than ever before. Maybe frontline employees seem to work under the normative work environment where their positive emotions must be put into the service production process. Because of practical importance, there has been a growing academic interest in service employees’feelings and emotions. A great deal has been done on investigating the relationships of positive emotion display with relevant variables, such as emotion expressiveness (Pugh, 2001), service climate (Tsai, 2001), emotion socialization programs (Rafaeli and Sutton, 1987), rewards (Rafaeli and Sutton, 1987), customer service quality (Mattila and Enz, 2002; Pugh, 2001), mood (Barger and Grandey, 2006; Tsai and Huang, 2002), satisfaction (Brown and Sulzer-Azaroff,1994; Mattila and Enz, 2002), and revisit and recommend intention (Tsai, 2001). Despite abundant past studies, still something remains unexplored about possible antecedents and consequences of employee’s emotional display. This paper attempted to extend the effect of emotional variables found in single encounter into a relationship marketing domain. This is possible through the mediating role of rapport in the relationship between emotional labor and relationship quality. We addressed customer-contact employees’ emotional labor that customers may perceive during service encounter and examined its effects on relationship quality. Emotional display and its authenticity were proposed to affect customer’s rapport with employee in service delivery, which subsequently affects trust and satisfaction. This study was executed in teaching service setting. Interactions between lecturer and students involve emotion display as well as knowledge transfer. While a teacher lectures to multiple students, students are in a position to repeatedly observe the teacher, and thus they can fully evaluate the teacher’s emotional expression and its authenticity. These characteristics are appropriate for this study that attempts to examine relationships among variables in repeated service encounters. 411 (91%) of 450 questionnaires distributed were collected from college students and they were used for empirical analyses. All measures used in this study were drawn from previous studies in marketing or organizational behavior. While most of the scales have been widely used in marketing research in Korea, some items were restated to be compatible with teaching services and some others were deleted during the scale purification process. While constructs of positive verbal and nonverbal expression and authenticity used five-point Likert-type scales, ranging from 1 “strongly disagree” to 5 “strongly agree,” other constructs used seven-point Likert-type scales. We tested hypothetical relationships and found evidence that both positive emotional display and authenticity have significant effects on rapport and, in case of verbal expression, both variables have an interactive influence on rapport. Rapport (i.e., enjoyable interaction,personal connection) which a customer feels from employee was found to contribute greatly to both trust and customer satisfaction for the successful customer relationship. The powerful effect of rapport on relationship quality cannot be overemphasized. While not explored in previous studies, the mediation tests we conducted indicated that rapport is an active mediator in the relationship between emotional labor and relationship quality. Our findings suggest that we pay more attention to understanding the effects of positive expression and authenticity on customer relationship. In this sense, it is an interesting finding that the authenticity of nonverbal expression has a strong direct effect on trust.