고객 특성이 서비스 직원의 적응적 서비스 제공에 미치는 영향

The present study was designed to empirically test the effects of the customer characteristics on the frontline-employee adaptive-service behavior according to the work engagement; to examine the motivational effect of the customer expertise and the customer positive affect empirically; to test the strain effects of the customer power and the customer complexity; and to explore the moderating role of the productivity complexity that can facilitate the employee adaptive-service behavior. For this paper, a single cross-sectional descriptive design was used. Purposive sampling was used to identify the respondents who are frontline employees of the banking industry in South Korea. To analyze the data, LISREL 8.53 and conditional-process modeling were used. The results show a significant relationship between the customer characteristics and the employee adaptive-service behavior, establishing work engagement as an intervening mechanism. This research identifies the negative effects of the customer power and the customer complexity on the employee work engagement. The customer expertise and positive affect, as customer resources, are positively related to work engagement. The findings also suggested that the moderating role of the productivity complexity strengthened the positive effect of work engagement regarding the adaptive-service offering. For managers who want or need to ensure that they are not at a disadvantage in their power relationships with their customers, this study offers useful insights. To ensure a power balance, managers should firstly try to reduce the number of their employees who oversee single and/or big customers, and instead enforce the management of varied customer portfolios. Second, managers need to institute cultural change in their organizations so that customer expertise is viewed as a valuable resource and customers are drawn into new product- or service-production processes. Third, if it is possible for the frontline employees to identify and track the customer positive affect that is transferred by nonverbal cues, and they are trained to respond to this positive mood, the employees can monitor and adjust their behaviors to fix the customer problems. This study explores the important causal linkages between the customer characteristics and work engagement that are implied by the job demands-resources (JD-R) model but have not been considered in previous research. Moreover, this research also categorizes the variety of customer characteristics into the customer resources and demands based on the JD-R model. This paper therefore advances the JD-R model as an integrative theoretical framework for the research on the customer-frontline employee interaction.