Frontline employees’ innovative service behavior as key to customer loyalty:insights into FLEs’ resource gain spiral

Abstract

Many service firms require frontline service employees (FLEs) to follow routines and standardized operating procedures during the service encounter, to deliver consistently high service standards. However, to create superior, pleasurable experiences for customers, featuring both helpful services and novel approaches to meeting their needs, firms in various sectors also have begun to encourage FLEs to engage in more innovative service behaviors. This study therefore investigates a new and complementary route to customer loyalty, beyond the conventional service-profit chain, that moves through FLEs' innovative service behavior. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study introduces a resource gain spiral at the service encounter, which runs from FLEs' emotional job engagement to innovative service behavior, and then leads to customer delight and finally customer loyalty. In accordance with COR theory, the proposed model also includes factors that might hinder (customer aggression, underemployment) or foster (colleague support, supervisor support) FLEs' resource gain spiral. A multilevel analysis of a large-scale, dyadic data set that contains responses from both FLEs and customers in multiple industries strongly supports the proposed resource gain spiral as a complementary route to customer loyalty. The positive emotional job engagement-innovative service behavior relationship is undermined by customer aggression and underemployment, as hypothesized. Surprisingly though, and contrary to the hypotheses, colleague and supervisor support do not seem to foster FLEs' resource gain spiral. Instead, colleague support weakens the engagement-innovative service behavior relationship, and supervisor support does not affect it. These results indicate that if FLEs can solicit resources from other sources, they may not need to invest as many of their individual resources. In particular, colleague support even appears to serve as a substitute for FLEs' individual resource investments in the resource gain spiral.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/jpim.12338
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Marketing & Strategy
Additional Information: © 2016 The Authors Journal of Product Innovation Management by Wiley Periodicals, Inc on behalf of Product Development & Management Association This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Engineering(all),Strategy and Management,Management of Technology and Innovation
Publication ISSN: 1540-5885
Last Modified: 12 Feb 2024 08:10
Date Deposited: 23 Sep 2016 07:11
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Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://onlinel ... 1111/jpim.12338 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2017-03-01
Published Online Date: 2016-09-23
Accepted Date: 2016-07-15
Authors: Stock, Ruth Maria
de Jong, Ad (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-3016-5354)
Zacharias, Nicolas A.

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