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Journal of Business and Psychology

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01-03-2015

The Value of a Smile: Does Emotional Performance Matter More in Familiar or Unfamiliar Exchanges?

Authors: Allison S. Gabriel, Jennifer D. Acosta, Alicia A. Grandey

Published in: Journal of Business and Psychology | Issue 1/2015

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose was to understand how service familiarity (i.e., the familiarity of the customer with the employee and service provided) operates as a boundary condition for the impact of employee positive emotional displays on service performance.

Design/Methodology/Approach

In Study 1, we assessed whether service familiarity (as rated by employees) moderated the relationship of employee-reported positive emotional displays and coworker ratings of service performance. In Study 2, through observed employee–customer exchanges, we tested whether customer-reported familiarity with the service context moderated the relationship between third-party-observed employee positive emotional displays and customer ratings of transaction satisfaction and employee friendliness.

Findings

Employee positive emotional displays had the strongest influence on evaluations of performance under low familiarity contexts. Thus, positive emotional displays served as a signal of good performance when there was limited preexisting information about the employee.

Implications

Service performance evaluations may be less influenced by employee positive emotional displays when the customer has a familiar relationship, suggesting that such displays from the employee are not always necessary. However, for encounters, employee positive emotional displays are more critical for signaling high quality service performance.

Originality/Value

This combination of studies is among the first to isolate the influence of service familiarity at two different levels of conceptualization and measurement using multi-source ratings of service performance.

previous article What Makes Us Enthusiastic, Angry, Feeling at Rest or Worried? Development and Validation of an Affective Work Events Taxonomy Using Concept Mapping Methodology

next article What Do You Want To Be? Criterion-Related Validity of Attained Vocational Aspirations Versus Inventoried Person–Vocation Fit

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For thoroughness, we considered regression models with all possible combinations of potential control variables included. This did not alter results for Study 1 in any way. Thus, we chose to retain a more parsimonious model by just focusing on employee gender and occupational service familiarity.

During the first year of the observations, both coders rated the employees’ emotional displays to obtain inter-rater reliability scores as reported below. Since they were reliable, we had them perform these tasks separately in the second year to make the employee and customer data more independent.

Results for efficiency are available from the first author upon request.

Since the customers’ efficiency ratings are strongly related to transaction satisfaction and to friendliness ratings, we considered controlling for efficiency; however, this may suppress critical variance in our performance measure. For thoroughness, we tested our predictions including efficiency as well as gender and brand familiarity, and we found that our hypothesized results remained unaltered. As such, we removed efficiency from all analyses.

To be conservative, we tested our model using multilevel analysis (observations as Level-1 and store as Level-2) and found convergence with standard regression results reported.

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Title: The Value of a Smile: Does Emotional Performance Matter More in Familiar or Unfamiliar Exchanges?
Authors: Allison S. Gabriel
Jennifer D. Acosta
Alicia A. Grandey
Publication date: 01-03-2015
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of Business and Psychology / Issue 1/2015
Print ISSN: 0889-3268
Electronic ISSN: 1573-353X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-013-9329-2

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Abstract

Purpose

Design/Methodology/Approach

Findings

Implications

Originality/Value

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