The Impact of Role Conflict on Frontline Employees’ Adaptive Service Behavior: The Moderation Effect of Role Ambiguity: An Abstract

Adapting service behavior is one crucial ability for frontline service employees. Since frontline employees inevitably experience role stress due to demands or ambiguous expectations, studies have revealed influence of role stressor (i.e., role conflict, role ambiguity) on adaptive behavior (e.g., Hartline and Ferrell 1996; Miao and Evans 2013; Rapp et al. 2005). These studies in general viewed both role conflict and role ambiguity as role stressors that negatively affect employees’ adaptive behavior. However, a review of the literature indicates inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between employees’ role stress and job performance; in particular, role conflicts at times also contribute to job outcomes (e.g., Babin and Boles 1996; Knight et al. 2007).

To clarify the relationship between role stressors and adaptive service behavior (ASB), this study redefine role conflict and role ambiguity in terms of the sources causing the stress. First, we argue that frontline employees as organizational boundary spanners typically experience conflict for satisfying demands from their supervisors and customers. Therefore, we characterize role conflicts into either supervisor-related or customer-related. We hypothesize a negative relationship between both types of role conflicts on adaptive behaviors. Second, we postulate that task-related role ambiguity, as external cues provided by the organization, could mitigate the negative effects of role conflict on ASB. Lens situational strengthen theory, we infer task-related role ambiguity constitutes a weak situation. Under this working situation, employees have more freedom to interpret their job and decide how to respond to the requirements from work. In addition, we also examine the relationship between employees’ ASB and their service performance.

The study surveyed 229 customer service representatives working in a call center. Analyses indicate that supervisor-related and customer-related role conflict negatively relate to employees’ ASB that positively relates to service performance. As predicted, the negative effect of customer-related role conflict on ASB is weakened when employees perceive high task-related role ambiguity. However, the effects of supervisor-related role conflict on ASB remain the same, regardless of the level of task-related job ambiguity. Further plots on the moderation effects suggest that role conflicts with the customer could increase the degree of ASB when employees receive high ambiguity regarding task-related instruction, which has significant implications for managing frontline service employees.