It’s the Strength of the Ties: How Multiplex Social Networks Among Frontline Employees Drive Service Performance

The service marketing literature has focused its efforts on individual influencing factors and dyadic relationships to explain frontline employees’ customer service behaviour and performance. This paper argues and demonstrates that this scope is too limited, as service employee behaviour and performance is not independent from the broader set of relationships surrounding them. We introduce a social network perspective to the analysis of service performance and distinguish between weaker simple ties and stronger multiplex ties consisting of advice and friendship relations in the studied branch networks of a major Australian bank. We find that it is the density of multiplex ties that predicts the performance-relevant value of social networks in a service setting. This effect is moderated by branch network size so that for larger branches the existence of dense multiplex ties increases performance more strongly than for smaller branches.