混合销售控制系统对员工感知服务氛围的影响:能力控制与顾客管家控制的三重交互作用

The Influence of Hybrid Control Systems on Employee’s Perceived Service Climate:The Three-way Interactions of Capability Control and Customer Stewardship Control

零售行业的销售人员是典型的一线员工,他们感知的服务氛围是业绩的重要影响因素。本研究首次将基于管家理论的非正式控制系统引入基于代理理论的正式控制系统,构成混合销售控制系统,探究其对员工服务氛围感知的影响机制。本研究以线下零售门店销售人员为研究对象,通过面对面访问收集数据,使用逐步层级回归进行数据分析和假设检验。研究发现,正式控制中的活动控制和结果控制对员工服务氛围感知有积极作用,能力控制增强了上述效应。本研究进一步发现,当上述机制引入属于非正式控制系统的顾客管家控制后,还存在三重交互效应,即只有当能力控制和顾客管家控制均较强时,活动、结果控制对员工感知服务氛围的积极影响才成立。本文是首个关于包含混合销售控制系统如何影响销售人员业绩相关变量的研究成果,对销售管理领域的理论和实践都有贡献。

Regardless of the advancement of digital retailing,the tremendous impact of frontline salespeople on retail performance on the physical retail floor cannot be ignored.For many consumer goods retailers,the service quality of frontline sales staff during sales interactions is one of the elements that constitute a core competitive advantage,and how to improve sales service quality is an issue of great concern in the sales management field.Therefore,this paper focuses on service climate,one of the important influencing factors of sales service quality.Employee-perceived service climate refers to the service climate shared by employees,which refers to the common feeling of employees about the service quality-centered policies,practices and procedures they experienced,and the importance attached to service quality they saw in the rewards and support they received from the company.Existing research on perceptions of service climate,developed from a number of theoretical perspectives including social exchange theory,social learning theory,social information processing theory,and self-determination theory,has demonstrated that a good employee perception of service climate can significantly improve service quality and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.In addition,from an intra-company perspective,employees’perception of service climate is also closely related to employee knowledge sharing,job satisfaction,emotional commitment,and organizational citizenship behavior,which are all outcome variables that are antecedent variables of good sales performance.However,as a cross-cutting discipline,there is less research on the antecedent variables of employee perceived service climate in the field of sales management in marketing.Based on research results in both organizational behavior and marketing management,this paper for the first time introduces an informal control system based on the stewardship theory into a formal control system based on the agency theory,constituting a hybrid sales control system;and it reveals the mechanism by which the hybrid sales control system positively affects employees’perceived service climate.Sales control system is an important research content of sales management,and the related research is mainly carried out based on the agency theory,and the research goal is to build a perfect sales control system and realize the coordination between various subsystems.The sales control system based on the agency theory is called formal control system,which regards the sales staff as the agent of the company and the sales control system as a management tool to guide and regulate the behavior of employees;and this system considers that the behavior of employees needs to be strictly monitored and controlled.Formal control systems consist of three subsystems,namely,activity control,outcome control,and capability control.The intensity of control affects employee engagement,out-of-role behavior,adaptive selling,job performance,customer satisfaction,and other outcome variables.Informal sales control systems are broadly defined as those proposed based on theories other than the agency theory.From the perspective of the underlying theory,the counterpart of the agency theory is the stewardship theory,which does not treat salespeople as agents of the company,but rather as stewards of customers;and for the stewardship theory,salespeople should have psychological ownership of customers’interests.Based on the stewardship theory,Schepers and his co-workers first introduced the concept of customer stewardship control(CSC),in which they argued that companies should establish a psychological control system designed to give front-line employees psychological ownership and moral responsibility for the overall interests of customers.Several exploratory and review studies have argued that stewardship control,in addition to its main effect on performance,may interact with formal control systems.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate how it can have a positive effect as an informal control embedded in the classical formal sales control system.The integration of formal control systems and CSC systems is called hybrid sales control systems and is a new direction in sales control research.The hybrid sales control system referred to in this paper includes not only the three subsystems of the formal control system(activity control,outcome control,and capability control),but also the informal control system of CSC.This paper is the first to use retail service as a research context to demonstrate the existence of a triple interaction mechanism among the four subsystems in influencing employees’perceptions of service climate.This paper uses a phased questionnaire research method to interview faceto-face all employees of offline retail store chains distributed in three cities,with offline retail store sales staff as the study population.To reduce homoscedastic error,all variables are obtained in three stages.We use stepwise hierarchical regression with field visit data for data analysis and hypothesis testing.This paper not only verifies the main effect of activity control and outcome control in the mixed sales control system on the perception of positive service climate,but also verifies the moderating effect of capability control and,more importantly,the existence of a triple interaction effect.First,both activity control and outcome control in the formal control system positively influence employees’perceived service climate,and capability control positively moderate these two positive effects.Specifically,employees’perceptions of service climate become more positive with increasing levels of activity control,and the positive relationship between employees’perceptions of service climate and activity control is stronger in the case of high capability control,but in the case of low capability control,employees’perceptions of service climate do not vary with the level of activity control.The same moderating effect occurs for the positive relationship between outcome control and service climate perception.Second,considering the triple interaction effect after incorporating CSC,activity control(or outcome control)has a significant positive effect on employees’perceptions of service climate only when both capability control and CSC are at high levels;and when either capability control or CSC is at low levels,the association between activity control(or outcome control)and employees’perceptions of service climate is not significant.This paper is the first to include how mixed sales control systems affect variables related to salesperson performance.From the theoretical perspective,this paper reveals a triple interaction mechanism in which the subsystems of the hybrid sales control system act on employees’perceptions of service climate.From a practical perspective,this paper answers the question of when capability control is effective as a positive moderator of activity control and outcome control for developing good employee perceptions of service climate.