How does customer affiliative behaviour shape the outcomes of employee emotion regulation? A daily diary study of supermarket checkout operators

Abstract

Few studies have examined how customer behaviour shapes the outcomes of employees’ emotion regulation. Drawing on existing literature, this article tests two alternative models of customer affiliative behaviour (e.g. smiling, engaging in short conversation), employee emotion regulation (surface acting, deep acting) and employee outcomes (emotional exhaustion, objective task performance). In one model, customer affiliative behaviour is a mechanism that mediates the relationship between employee emotion regulation and outcomes, and in the other model customer affiliative behaviour moderates this relationship. The models were tested on data drawn from a daily diary study of 49 supermarket checkout operators and store performance records. The findings from multilevel analyses make a significant contribution to understanding how a key part of the social context during service interactions (i.e. customer affiliative behaviour) is a mechanism and moderator of employee emotion regulation. Results show that the effects of deep and surface acting on employee well-being are mediated by customer affiliative behaviour, and that relationship between surface acting and task performance is mediated by customer affiliative behaviour and emotional exhaustion. In addition, customer affiliative behaviour moderated the relationship between deep acting and emotional exhaustion, and the indirect effect of deep acting on task performance through emotional exhaustion.

Buffering negative impacts of jaycustomer behavior on service employees

“…This organization has nearly 180 stores with more than 500 service employees. Referred to previous literature with diary studies as the data collection method (Grandey et al, 2002;Holman, 2016), we targeted to have at least 500 data points (i.e. around 50 employees for 10 days).…”

Assembling cybersecurity: The politics and materiality of technical malware reports and the case of Stuxnet

“…The second materialist element to this article's method draws on Latour's (2005Latour's ( , 2007 and Walters's (2014) discussion of "public assemblies." Latour characterizes politics as being typified by realist epistemologies that presume in the presentation and assertion of indisputable facts-his counter to this is the concept of dingpolitik, or politics oriented around "matters of concern" and controversies (Latour, 2005(Latour, , 2007. Walters builds on Latour's discussion, suggesting that such controversies are cases that cannot be resolved in the realist sense, because of the impossibility of calling on "a world of indisputable facts that exists outside any scheme of representation" (Walters, 2014, p. 104).…”

“…Malware and coding are materials that exceed human capacities to sense or understand them, so that they do not present themselves to us in unmediated fashions: They require spokespersons, mediators, interpreters. This section will therefore outline a materialist-minded approach that can trace the situated and contingent alliances mobilized in reports such as Symantec's, drawing on Latour's (2005Latour's ( , 2007 and Walters's (2014) discussion of "public assemblies." The main part of the article will then be taken up with an empirical account of a specific site of emergent practices of knowledge production in the field of cybersecurity, and the dynamics between state and nonstate actors.…”

“I-just-wanna-get-by” hurts teachers and their work: Linking preschool teacher identity to work withdrawals in an emerging economy

“…This finding highlights the salience of preschool teachers’ authentic self-expression consistent with the emotion work of Erickson and Wharton ( 1997 ) which illuminates that being inauthentic in interactive service work produces strain. Also, the recognition that comes with meeting emotional expectations enhances well-being and improved work behaviors by preventing the strain (Holman, 2016 ; Humphrey et al, 2015 ).…”