Impact of frontline service employees’ acculturation behaviors on customer satisfaction and commitment in intercultural service encounters

Abstract

This study explores the impact of four types of acculturation behaviors of frontline service employees (assimilation, separation, integration, and marginalization) on customer satisfaction and customer commitment. Design/methodology/approach: 377 ethnically diverse customers of a retail bank in New Zealand participated in this study. SmartPLS3 was used to test all the hypotheses. Findings: Assimilation and integration have positive effects on both customer satisfaction and commitment. Marginalization has a negative effect on both customer satisfaction and commitment but separation has a negative effect only on customer satisfaction and not on customer commitment. Research limitations/implications-Future research may validate and extend our findings in diverse cultural settings and use experimental method to explore the socio-psychological mechanisms underlying the influence of frontline service employees' acculturation behaviors on customer satisfaction and commitment. Practical implications-This study will help managers understand the importance of service employees' acculturation behaviors and develop suitable recruitment strategies and training programs to improve their impact on customer satisfaction and commitment. Originality/value: This study extends current research on intercultural service encounters by looking beyond the moderating effects of four types of service employees' acculturation behaviors, to explore their direct effects on customer satisfaction and commitment.

Challenges and opportunities for services marketers in a culturally diverse global marketplace

“…Customer responses in intercultural service encounters e.g., customer reactions to ethnic/cultural dissimilarity with servicce employees (Etgar and Fuchs, 2011), service failure and recovery (de Matos et al, 2011), employee's acculturation behaviours (Poulis et al, 2013), ethnic accents (Tombs and Rao Hill, 2014); stereotyping of culturally different service employees by customers (Hopkins et al, 2005;Javalgi and Martin, 2007;Ueltschy et al, 2007), perceived discrimination by service employees Antecedents of customer and employee perceptions and behaviours in intercultural service encounters e.g., attentiveness (Lee, 2015), acculturation behaviours (Gaur et al, 2017) and linguistic choices of frontline service employees (Zolfagharian et al, 2018), language homophily between customers and employees (Pezzuti et al, 2018), perceived cultural distance and customer participation (Ang et al, 2018), customer-employee (mis)match and cultural vs. non-cultural attributions (Sichtmann and Micevski, 2018), Intercultural competence and customer facial recognition (Henderson et al, 2018), Technology readiness and consumer socialization of teenagers (Mishra, Maheswarappa and Colby, 2018), religiosity and consumer choice of fitness services (Summers et al, 2018), Impact of service models and culture on work behaviours (Mathies and Wong, 2018).…”

“…Notwithstanding the significant contribution of past research on the challenges and opportunities for services marketers in the culturally diverse markets, there are still many unanswered questions and unresolved research gaps. For example, most of the research in this area mainly focuses on the customers' perspective and that too in the context of intercultural service encounters in the business-to-consumers (B2C) services (Gaur et al, 2017;Sharma et al, 2009Sharma et al, , 2012Sharma and Zhan, 2015;Sharma et al, 2016;Tam et al, 2014;Tam, Sharma and Kim, 2016), with hardly any research on the Business-to-business (B2B) contexts and intercultural interactions among employees in a multicultural workplace (e.g., Fung et al, 2017), both of which constitute substantially large components of the global marketplace that has become quite multicultural in recent years and continues to grow even more. In addition, there is still no comprehensive conceptual framework that could explain the ways in which cultural differences shape customer and employee expectations, perceptions and evaluations in monocultural, multi-cultural and intercultural service encounters.…”

“…Subsequent studies examined the role of employee stress and coping (Wang and Mattila, 2010), cross-cultural consumer to consumer interactions (Johnson and Grier, 2013), emotional labour (Chuapetcharasopon, 2014), preference for ethnic service staff (Baumann and Setogawa, 2014), attributions (Tam, Sharma and Kim, 2014) and intercultural communication competence (Ihtiyar and Ahmad, 2015) in intercultural service encounters. More recent studies explore the roles of moderators such as service role and outcome (Sharma, Tam and Kim, 2015), consumer ethnocentrism and intercultural competence (Sharma and Zhan, 2015) and personal cultural orientations (Sharma, Zhan and Su, 2016), while others examine the role of acculturation behaviours by frontline service employees in shaping customer satisfaction and commitment (Gaur et al, 2017) and the mediating role of intercultural service quality in the influence of service climate on employee performance in multicultural service settings (Fung et al, 2017).…”

Impact of Salespeople's Entrepreneurial Behavior toward Customer Satisfaction, Trust, Commitment, and Loyalty

“…In banks, employee behavior has a positive impact on customer satisfaction [7]. Service capability reduces uncertainty in customer and increases their satisfaction [22]. Professional banking has an impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty [19].…”

“…According to Gaur, Sharma, Herjanto & Kingshott [22], frontline experience and capability could convince and enhance customer satisfaction, which leads to customer commitment. Professional bankers influence customer satisfaction and loyalty [19].…”