何以报“怨”?顾客抱怨对员工角色服务行为的影响机制研究

How to Respond to Complaints? The Impact Mechanism of Customer Complaints on Employee Prosocial Service Behaviors

顾客抱怨是服务过程中经常发生的现象,但学界就一线服务员工经历顾客抱怨后的认知反应和服务行为表现缺乏实证探索。本文探究了一线服务员工经历的顾客抱怨通过工作调节焦点状态对角色服务行为的影响过程,并探讨了工作中心性在此影响过程中的权变作用。通过对352份酒店业配对样本和106份实验样本的数据分析,本研究的结果表明,顾客抱怨和员工角色外和角色内服务行为均存在正关联。同时,促进型工作焦点和防御型工作焦点也都在顾客抱怨影响员工角色服务行为的过程中起着重要的认知作用。进一步,工作中心性较高时,顾客抱怨对促进型焦点的正向影响会被增强,且对防御型焦点的负向影响会被削弱。本文丰富了员工对顾客抱怨的认知和行为的远期响应研究,从由外而内的视角探索了顾客抱怨在员工层面的影响效应,并提出了提升员工服务绩效的策略,对服务型企业的实践具有一定的指导意义。

The current highly-uncertain service environment and frequent customer complaints continue to exacerbate the work crisis of front-line employees in the service industry. This means that front-line employees must respond to the complex and changing service environment by understanding and digesting customer complaints in order to achieve adaptive improvements in service abilities.However, existing literature focuses more on the impact of customer complaints on the customers themselves, and lacks exploration on how customer complaints affect the employees with whom they contact. In view of this, based on the regulatory focus theory, this paper proposes an integrated model of customer complaints, work regulatory focus, work centrality and prosocial service behaviors, and constructs hypotheses accordingly.The study was conducted as a combination of questionnaire and experiment, and validated scales were selected to develop into question items. The questionnaire was divided into two phases for matched data collection. In the first phase, data on customer complaints(antecedent variable), work centrality,and related control variables were completed by front-line employees in the hospitality industry in early August 2021, while information on promotion/prevention work focus(employee questionnaire) and role-prescribed/extra-role service behaviors(supervisor questionnaire) were collected later in the same month. Finally, 352 valid samples were obtained. The experimental study manipulated the high level of customer complaints and asked subjects to fill in the questionnaires of promotion/prevention work focus and role-prescribed/extra-role service behaviors after receiving stimuli, and 106 valid samples were finally obtained.The results indicate that: Customer complaints have a facilitating effect on both role-prescribed and extra-role service behaviors;customer complaints can affect employee prosocial service behaviors by stimulating their work regulatory focus;and increased work centrality can change the impact of customer complaints on work regulatory focus and thus promote individuals to implement differentiated prosocial service behaviors. Therefore, this paper verifies the mediating role of work regulatory focus and the moderating role of work centrality, clarifies the mechanism of customer complaints on employees’ cognitive and behavioral responses, and enriches the research on customer complaints and customer-employee relationships.The main contributions are that: First, the relationship between customer complaints and employees’ long-term responsive behaviors is systematically and empirically sorted out, and the impact of customer complaints is further extended from the customer level to the employee behavior level,which enriches the theoretical research in the field of customer complaints from an extra-organizational to an intra-organizational perspective. Second, this paper incorporates individual state-based regulatory focus and work cognition into the process of customer complaints affecting employee work behaviors,and clarifies what type of state-based regulatory focus formed by employees in their work can better help them perform subsequent prosocial service behaviors and how work centrality plays a modulatory role in this relationship, which expands the research on employees’ identification and assessment of customer complaints in the work environment. Third, this paper provides valuable reference for firms to effectively relieve the negative state of employees and guide employees to actively seek service improvements, which helps to effectively resolve the adverse impact of customer complaints on employees.