Conflicts in the Work–Family Interface: Links to Job Stress, Customer Service Employee Performance, and Customer Purchase Intent

Abstract

Because customer service employees often represent the sole contact a customer has with a firm, it is important to examine job-related factors that affect customer service employee performance and customer evaluations. In two diverse customer settings, the authors capture matched responses from service employees, supervisors, and customers. The authors use the data to examine the potential chain of effects from customer service employee work-family conflict and family-work conflict, to job stress and job performance, to customer purchase intent (CPI). The results show direct (and indirect) effects of work-family conflict and family-work conflict on service employee customer-directed extra-role performance (CDERP). The results also show direct effects of job stress on service employee in-role performance (IRP) and CDERP and on CPI. Furthermore, the findings show that job stress has a more pronounced effect on IRP than on CDERP and that CDERP has a greater effect on CPI than does IRP. The authors conclude with a discussion of managerial and theoretical implications.

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

“…As suggested by Grant (2008), when intrinsically motivated, employees enjoy the process of completing tasks and perceive volition and free choice in their efforts to benefit others (i.e., act prosocially). Netemeyer et al (2005) also find that empowering employees motivates them to perform better in customerdirected extra-role behaviors (i.e., OCBs toward customers, or OCB-C in our study). In turn, we hypothesize that employees' intrinsic service task motivation mediates the effect of servicing empowerment on their service performance.…”

“…All items related to these five 23 indicators were adopted from OCB literature, with minor modifications to fit our study context (Podsakoff et al 1990). We used these supervisor-rated measures of employee performance because employees are likely to overrate their performance (Netemeyer et al 2005) and including two informants mitigates the same-source bias (Chan et al 2010).…”

“…Although some research suggests that employees engage in extra-role services because of their self-interested goal of impression management, rather than being altruistic or voluntary (e.g., Bolino 1999), we adopt the conventional view to define OCB-C as voluntary, authentic, 11 and enjoyable in nature (e.g., Netemeyer et al 2005;Organ 1997). We leave to further research the investigation of alternative conceptualizations.…”

Does Work-Family Conflict Affect the Auditor’s Performance?: Examining the Mediating Roles of Emotional Exhaustion and Job Satisfaction

“…Almost all people undergo dual roles nowadays, as a worker and as a family mem-ber (parent or child) (Choi and Kim 2012;Netemeyer et al 2005). Each role is important for every individual's life because we cannot deny that humans are social beings and also economic beings.…”

The Influence of Stress on the Health of Workers in Manufacturing Industry

“…Family conflict disrupts the tranquillity of work, which causes tension and stress to the worker (Netemeyer, Maxham, & Pullig, 2005). Work-life balance has been a bane for many workers especially those in high level management.…”