Emotional intelligence in front-line/back-office employee relationships

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to undertake a simultaneous assessment of interdependence in the behaviours of front-line and back-office employees and their joint effect on customer-related organisational performance. It also tests for a moderating influence of the emotional intelligence of front-line salespeople and back-office employees. Design/methodology/approach The sample comprises 105 front-line sales employees and 77 back-office employees. The customer-related organisational performance data come from a UK business-to-business (B2B) electronics company. With these triadic data, this study uses partial least squares to estimate the measurement and structural models. Findings Salespeople’s customer orientation directly affects customer-related organisational performance; the relationship is moderated by salespeople’s emotional intelligence. The emotional intelligence of salespeople also directly affects the customer-directed citizenship behaviour of back-office employees. Furthermore, the emotional intelligence of back-office staff moderates the link between the emotional intelligence of salespeople and back-office staff citizenship behaviour. Back-office staff citizenship behaviour, in turn, affects customer-related organisational performance. Originality/value The emotions deployed by employees in interactions with customers clearly shape customers’ perceptions of service quality, as well as employee-level performance outcomes. However, prior literature lacks insights into the simultaneous effects of front-line and back-office employee behaviour, especially in B2B settings. This paper addresses these research gaps by investigating triadic relationships – among back-office employees, front-line employees and customer outcomes – in a B2B setting, where they are of particular managerial interest.

How Commitment, Satisfaction, and Cost Fluctuations Influence Customer Loyalty

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“…Emotional intelligence also weakens the positive influence of role ambiguity on salesperson emotional exhaustion. Kearney et al (2017) To assess (1) the behavioral interdependence between frontline and back-office employees and their joint effect on customer-related organizational performance and (2) to test the moderating effect of the emotional intelligence of frontline salespeople and back- There is an inverted U-shaped relationship between sales effort and relational performance, though this relationship becomes a positive linear one when the salesperson has higher levels of emotional intelligence. Briggs, Kalra, and Agnihotri, (2018) To understand the role of the salespeople's ability to appraise emotions and its impact on jobrelated consequences in a transaction-oriented setting Survey in an emerging market on 152 matched pairs of salespeople and supervisors working in a financial services organization Emotion appraisal ability gives rise to emotional exhaustion of the salesperson but improves his or her customer service.…”

Exploring the direct and indirect effects of emotional intelligence and frequency of customer contact on organisational citizenship behaviours among hotel employees in Mexico

“…Santos et al (2015) and others suggested that service employees' jobs traditionally require a high level of interpersonal contact with internal and external clients (Kulik et al, 2009;Lee and Ok, 2012). Moreover, the frequency of such interactions has been shown to have a substantial impact on employees' abilities and their use of emotions (Kearney et al, 2017;Mustafa et al, 2016). Jung and Yoon (2012) showed further evidence that among hotel employees the type of job (eg back of house (BOH) or front-of-house (FOH)) attenuated the relationship between EI and OCB.…”

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