Fake smiles. Customer reactions to employees’ display inauthenticity and choice restrictions

Abstract

Frontline employees’ fake smiles (i.e., positive emotion display inauthenticity) frequently occur despite firms’ efforts to ensure real smiles in service delivery. Previous research on the effects of display inauthenticity on customers reveals considerable heterogeneity. Attempts to resolve this have largely been limited to stable and dispositional factors, which often escape managerial control. The present research investigates the impacts of display inauthenticity, choice restrictions, and their interaction on service performance. Choice restrictions may buffer inauthenticity effects as demonstrated by results from three factorial experiments in different contexts (e.g., restrictions of service provider choice in predelivery in Study 1 and in‐store choice restrictions during service delivery in Studies 2 and 3). Frontline employees’ display inauthenticity negatively affects service performance only if customers are subjected to low but not high choice restrictions. The interaction effect is explained by customers’ interdependent self‐construal and is generalizable to actual spending behaviors. Our findings inform managers about the interplay of increasingly common inauthenticity and choice restrictions due to market shocks such as COVID‐19 and provide insights into managerial interventions that can be used to mitigate the effects of inauthenticity on customers.

The influence of frontline employee self‐disclosure about products in a retail store on customer trust in the retailer in the context of service encounters

“…Thus, perceived persuasive intent could be classified as a quasimoderator (Sharma et al, 1981). To “obviate the ambiguity about which of the predictor variables is the moderator” (Sharma et al, 1981, p. 294), the psychometric literature has avoided regarding moderators that show main effects as moderators (Pham et al, 2022). However, a quasimoderator has been accepted in the marketing literature as long as theoretical logic and grounds can decrease the aforementioned ambiguity (Hayes, 2017; Homburg et al, 2022; Pham et al, 2022; Sharma et al, 1981).…”

“…Nowadays, in an increasingly turbulent environment where corporates face declining sales and customers are under economic pressure (Wolff, 2022), many service firms are forced to compete for their market share and continuously improve service performance which can be defined as customers' assessment of frontline employee output (Gosserand & Diefendorff, 2005;Huang & Dai, 2010;Paul et al, 2015). In an attempt to achieve continuous improvement in service performance, service firms often train frontline employees in behaviors in service encounters such as requiring them to display real smiles via authenticity training programs (Pham et al, 2022). Among such frontline employee behaviors directly influencing service performance, one particular thing we have known little about is the act of revealing personal information about frontline employees themselves to customers.…”

An examination of frontline employee–customer incidental similarities in service failure and recovery contexts

“…Locus of causality reflects whether the rapport is driven by manipulative versus sincere motives (Ferris et al, 1995). Thus, attributions of sincerity are likely to increase the degree to which customers perceive FLEs are acting authentically, which is suggested to have positive interpersonal affective consequences (e.g., Pham et al, 2022), leading to the following:…”

Heeding emotions or seeking challenges? Family support processes cultivate consumers' emotion‐ and problem‐focused support‐seeking

“…Such a supportive role that employees play in stress attention is apparent, for instance, in how hairstylists can act as amateur therapists, rendering social support in the form of empathic understanding and verbal encouragement during their conversations with clients (Price & Arnould, 1999). In other settings, social support may be a more formal part of the service concept, requiring emotional labor from employees (Hochschild, 1983; Pham et al, 2022). Yet, this does not seem to inhibit customers' perceptions that they are being socially supported.…”