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Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

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01.08.2011

The trade-off of servicing empowerment on employees’ service performance: examining the underlying motivation and workload mechanisms

verfasst von: Kimmy Wa Chan, Wing Lam

Erschienen in: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science | Ausgabe 4/2011

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Abstract

Literature on empowerment as an internal marketing practice primarily documents positive effects on employees’ job performance, though increasing evidence suggests conflicting viewpoints. This study adopts an agency theoretical perspective to propose a workload mechanism, according to which the delegation of power from supervisors (principals) to service employees (agents) (i.e., servicing empowerment) is costly to employees and increases their perceived workload, which hampers their performance to serve customers. Using a laboratory experiment and a survey, this research reveals that the perceived workload and extant motivational mechanisms have conflicting effects on employees’ service performance. The former exerts a significant negative impact on tasks that involve conflicting principal-agent interests (e.g., handling customer complaints) but not on tasks with aligned principal-agent interests (e.g., organizational citizenship behaviors). Two control systems, performance appraisal (accurate and infrequent feedback) and principal-agent service goal congruence, mitigate the dysfunctional effect of perceived workload on employees’ service performance.

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We included the same measurements in Study 2 and obtained similar findings: Employees rated both emotional labor (α = .92, M = 5.03) and opportunism (α = .94, M = 5.12) as high for the CCHP task.

Because the service scope of our respondents involved more than one service area, the sum of the percentages for each service does not add up to 100.

To make it easier to interpret Fig. 2c, the low level of service goal congruence shown implies a high level of service goal incongruence, and vice versa.

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Titel: The trade-off of servicing empowerment on employees’ service performance: examining the underlying motivation and workload mechanisms
verfasst von: Kimmy Wa Chan
Wing Lam
Publikationsdatum: 01.08.2011
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science / Ausgabe 4/2011
Print ISSN: 0092-0703
Elektronische ISSN: 1552-7824
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-011-0250-9

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