The Imitation Game - Supervisors' Influence on Service Sweethearting

Publikations-Art

Kongressbeitrag

Autoren

Ertz, E., Oesterle, L., Büttgen, M.

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Veröffentlicht in

Conference Proceedings AMA SERVSIG 2016

ISBN / ISSN / eISSN

978-90-825680-0-4

Seite (von - bis)

152-156

Tagungsname

SERVSIG International Research Conference 2016

Tagungsort

Maastricht, The Netherlands

Tagungsdatum

2016, 17 - 19 June

Abstract

THE IMITATION GAME – SUPERVISORS’ INFLUENCE ON SERVICE SWEETHEARTING

Elias Ertz, Laura Oesterle, Marion Büttgen, University of Hohenheim

Relevance and aim of the study

Service sweethearting is responsible for losses of about $400 Billion in the US retail service sector and accounts for 35 percent of revenue losses (Brady, Voorhees, & Brusco, 2012; Tarnowski, 2008). Brady, Voorhees, and Brusco (2012) define service sweethearting as “an act of employee deviance in which frontline employees give unauthorized free or discounted goods or services to a friend or acquaintance”. Facing these issues, it is of high interest for both academia and practice to understand how service sweethearting can be reduced. So far, only few researchers approached this topic and to the best of our knowledge, only one study examined service sweethearting empirically (Brady, Voorhees, & Brusco, 2012). Since previous studies focused mainly on factors concerning the employee, we aim at investigating the impact of the supervisor on the sweethearting behavior of frontline service employees, which leads to the following research question: “Can managers reduce their employees’ service sweethearting behavior by their leadership behavior?”

 

Potential contributions to the field

This study aims to make a twofold contribution to the field of service relationships and to the research on deviance of frontline employees in services. First, we empirically examine whether there is an effect of employee sweethearting (the act of supervisor deviance in which supervisors privilege employees to the disadvantage of the company) on employees’ service sweethearting behavior.

Second, we investigate the mediating role of leader-member exchange (LMX) (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995) in the relationship between employee sweethearting and service sweethearting to deepen the understanding of the mechanism behind supervisor behavior affecting employee behavior.

Theoretical foundations and hypotheses development

Theory of imitation (Mowrer, 1950; 1960) states that people tend to imitate certain human beings. Parsons (1955) identifies the power of a person as an important origin of imitation, that is, people imitate powerful others more often than people that possess less power. Another cause for imitation is positive reinforcement provided by the model (Bandura & Huston, 1961). Those positive reinforcements represent gifts, praise or affection. Since employee sweethearting includes supervisor’s affection towards the employee and helping him at the company’s charge, it is likely that employees will imitate the supervisor’s behavior when interacting with customers.

H1:   Employees display service sweethearting behavior more frequently when employee sweethearting is high.

Need-to-belong theory (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) assumes that people are motivated to set up a certain amount of interpersonal relationships and that they are able to replace one relationship by another. Therefore, the need to belong can be regarded as a “powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation” (Baumeister & Leary, 1995, p. 497). As managers sweetheart their most favored employees and employees’ actions are motivated by their need to build and maintain interpersonal relationships, employee sweethearting leads to a better LMX-quality in the corresponding relationships. In consequence, the employee maintains a good relationship with his supervisor and feels a sense of belonging to the firm. Therefore, his urge to build another positive relationship with a customer fades and service sweethearting behavior is less frequent. Vice versa, when the employee’s relationship with his or her supervisor is of low quality, the need for positive interaction with customers becomes stronger and sweethearting frequency should be higher.

H2:   LMX-quality mediates the effect of employee sweethearting on service sweethearting such that employee sweethearting influences LMX-quality positively and LMX-quality affects service sweethearting negatively.

 

Methodology and findings

We analyze data from 225 employees who interact regularly with customers taking into account the relationship with their supervisors. Applying structural equation modelling (SPSS AMOS 22) we examine how employee sweethearting and LMX-quality affect frontline employees’ service sweethearting behavior (CFI = .937; RMSEA = .049).

The results show a significant positive direct effect of employee sweethearting on service sweethearting (β = .17, p < .05) and a negative indirect effect of employee sweethearting on service sweethearting via LMX-quality (β = -.05, p < .05), supporting hypothesis 1 and hypothesis 2. The direct effect of employee sweethearting on LMX quality is significant and positive (β = .34, p < .001) and the direct effect of LMX-quality on service sweethearting is significant and negative (β = -.16, p < .05) as we hypothesized before.

 

Discussion and Conclusion

Our findings extend our knowledge about the antecedents of service sweethearting by taking into account the role of the frontline employee’s supervisor. By sweethearting their employees, supervisors improve the relationship with their subordinates, i.e. developing a high-quality LMX-relationship. Since many studies have shown that high-quality LMX has several positive outcomes such as better work performance (e.g. Erdogan & Enders, 2007) or higher customer orientation (Medler-Liraz & Kark, 2012), it is desirable for supervisors to establish high-quality LMX-relationships with their subordinates. We introduce a new positive outcome of LMX that is especially relevant for service firms, by showing that high-quality LMX reduces the frequency of service sweethearting. While acknowledging positive aspects of the deviant leadership practice of employee sweethearting, that is, it indirectly lowers employees’ service sweethearting behavior, we also red-flag the negative side effects. Our results show that employees tend to imitate their supervisors’ deviance behavior by sweethearting the customers, which crucially harms the company. Furthermore, the practice of employee sweethearting comes at the expense of the organization, causing an additional harm to the company.

In conclusion, our findings show that the role of the supervisor is important when it comes to service sweethearting. Supervisors can reduce the service sweethearting behavior of their subordinates in two ways. First, by serving as a model and refrain from sweethearting behavior and second by improving the bond with their employees i.e. establishing high-quality LMX-relationships without the use of questionable practices.

References

Bandura, A., & Huston, A. C. (1961). Identification as a process of incidental learning. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63(2), 311.

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological bulletin, 117(3), 497.

Brady, M. K., Voorhees, C. M., & Brusco, M. J. (2012). Service sweethearting: its antecedents and customer consequences. Journal of Marketing, 76(2), 81-98.

Erdogan, B., & Enders, J. (2007). Support from the top: supervisors' perceived organizational support as a moderator of leader-member exchange to satisfaction and performance relationships. Journal of applied psychology, 92(2), 321.

Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. The leadership quarterly, 6(2), 219-247.

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Tarnowski, J. (2008). Good night, sweethearting. Progressive Grocer, 87(6), 126.